To be objective, go easy on the adjective

A word to the wise.

A solid narrative can be the difference between a compelling brand identity, and an also-ran. Getting your message right as a vendor means building persuasive, memorable copy that resonates with your buyers.

And there’s an entire industry out there to support you. I’ve met some brilliant wordsmiths in my time – and good copy writers are like gold. There are also a seemingly limitless supply of online tips, tools, and web portals, offering help and advice on how to word a certain thing in the right way. There’s also the editor function in Word, there’s great online grammar checking and editing tools, and of course our friend the online thesaurus. And that’s before we consider what AI brings to the party.

It would seem there’s no excuse for poor, dreary copy.

And yet, that is precisely what we all see every day.

Overblown, vacuous, rhetorical, self-absorbed drivel litters the ether, masquerading as value propositions or boilerplates.

And the syntactical culprit – all too often – is the unsightly, overused, factually-questionable, flow-impeding adjective. (yes, I just used four adjectives to make the point).

What He Said.

Neil Patel knows a thing or two about reaching your audience in the right way. His blog on the topic, contains a vital point about adjectives that every good copywriter will know by heart.

"Adjectives make your sentences longer, which requires more effort from the reader. Overindulgence in adjectives causes your copy to be verbose and cumbersome".

If you write more than you need, people tune out.

The blog then goes on a little witch-hunt of some of the more common offending adjectives in question.

The advice is good, but how best to put it into practice? It boils down to a quick sanity-check for all would-be storytellers, using a very simple concept that I’ve seen work in the past , that helps teams determine their value statements in the right way. It is something I refer to as the Zero Opposite test.

Zero Opposite.

Imagine you are in your product messaging workshop. You’re thinking about your core value proposition. You’re a tech company, you’ve been in business for a while, you’re well known for your product, and some customers love it. (Which means you’re just like a zillion other companies).

Your messaging workshop leader asks, “what are we?” and the floodgates open. Creative ideas explode from all quarters, among them, some classics -

“Innovative, market-leading, disruptive, customer-centric, data-driven, peerless, unrivalled...”

STOP!

As the Neil Patel blog gently suggests – “Adjectives like?state-of-the-art,?sophisticated?and?innovative?are devoid of meaning. Such words demand effort without rewarding the reader – making the copy ugly, bland, and almost nonsensical.”

Enter stage-left, the Zero Opposite test, which compels the writer to imagine your competitors, and whether any of them would describe themselves as the direct opposite of any of your suggested adjectives. After all, if you are not unique in some way, your copy is not compelling because it is just like everyone else.

So, let’s consider our previous list and imagine, if we can, who would ever dare suggest they were the opposite. It is quite illuminating...

Suggested Adjective - and the opposite viewpoint

Innovative - Stifled, no plans to release anything new

Market leading - Struggling to keep up with the market leaders

Disruptive - Unchanging, steady as you go

Customer-centric - Not really that concerned about our customers

Data-driven - Not especially interested in data

Peerless - Nobody else sells into our market

Unrivalled - Nobody else sells into our market

?

As you can see, if we use anything from our original list, we can be confident that nobody else will be promoting the opposite view. Who's going to admit they aren't a leader, or that they don't innovate? Therefore, if we choose to use them, we are – at best - going to sound like everybody else.

This is the “me too” dilemma of saying the same thing that your competitors are saying, and worse still, we are using the same meaningless words.

The zero opposite test challenges us to find alternative means of defining our unique value, avoiding vague cliches. Or, at the very least, it forces you to ask yourselves “in what way can we truly justify the label ‘market-leading’?” for example. If you are truly data-driven, what data do you have that proves that you have more claim to that label than your biggest competitor?

How prevalent an issue is this? Look at your own web site, or your annual report, or your “About Us” page, and those of one or two of your rivals, and see how often those adjectives crop up, and many others besides. As straightforward as this advice might be, it is rarely enforced well enough. This is equally true across products and services as it is for corporate brands.

Conclusion - making words work for you.

The fix is simple: be tough on yourself, and ensure an experienced and empowered copywriter sits at the table of the messaging workshop. Be honest about who you are, and don’t be lazy about how to describe that.

Overall –

·?????? Be succinct

·?????? Use more descriptive nouns

·?????? Remove ‘filler’ adjectives that fail the ‘no opposite’ test