Increasing Clarity & Fluency in Your Writing

Vesselin Malev
5 min readSep 27, 2021

--

People think copywriting is about persuasion. And it is.

But persuasion is all about presentation. And presentation is all about clarity.

Because regardless of what you’re trying to persuade someone to do or who you’re trying to persuade, you have to make sure the message you’re trying to get across is clear and easy to understand.

If content is unnecessarily complex, readers will perceive the writer of the content to be less intelligent. (This was examined by Daniel M. Oppenheimer in his 2006 study.)

I’ve wanted to talk about clarity for a long time since it’s directly related to a term that’s not really talked about in the copywriting space — processing fluency.

In short, your opinion of any given piece of content will be largely determined by the ease and speed at which you can process it.

When your readers can’t easily process your content, they can become bored and confused. Those negative feelings, in turn, get attached to you, the writer.

To increase the processing fluency (hence the clarity, hence the persuasion) of your copywriting, you have to find ways to simplify your message.

Today, I’m here to share some of my (research-backed) techniques you can use to do exactly that.

STRATEGY #1 — USE SENTENCES WITH POSITIVE FRAMES

Positive framing increases the clarity and fluency of your message.

Negative frames describe absences. Positive frames (usually) describe something more tangible.

Example:

Positive frame: Use positive frames.

Negative frame: Don’t use negative frames.

Example 2:

Positive frame: Go out there and win.

Negative frame: Go out there and don’t lose.

Your brain requires more mental resources to process negative frames. Therefore, they reduce the comprehension and impact of your copy. (Studied by Jacoby, Nelson, & Hoyer, 1982).

That being said, don’t be afraid to use negative frames occasionally.

One thing I want you (as a writer or copywriter) to get out of this article is how you can use processing fluency strategically. When you have to be clear and to the point, stick to positive sentences in an active voice. And in some situations, it might be better to sacrifice a bit of processing fluency in order to paint a more vivid picture that requires more mental resources to process.

(Learn more about creating mental images with your copywriting in this article.)

STRATEGY #2 — USE ACTIVE VOICE (over PASSIVE VOICE)

In active sentences, the subject performs the action.

In passive sentences, the subject is the receiver of an action.

Example:

ACTIVE: The writer wrote the article.

PASSIVE: The article was written by the writer.

Active sentences are clearer (and therefore more persuasive) than passive sentences precisely because they are easier to process.

Here’s my point proven by Lawrence Hosman’s 2002 study:

“Sentences with more complex grammatical structures are more difficult to understand. Comprehension is an antecedent to persuasion, so difficulties in comprehension affect the persuasion process negatively…”

In short, active sentences increase processing fluency (and persuasion.) When readers can digest your message easily, they experience a subtle positive emotion that gets attributed to you.

STRATEGY #3 — USE COHERENCE MARKERS IN YOUR COPY

Consider the following two sentences:

1. Your landing pages are the place people buy from you. If you test two different variations of a landing page against each other, one of them might lead to more sales. Having multiple landing pages is a great strategy to improve the results of your funnel.

2. Your landing pages are the place people buy from you. But if you test two of them against each other, one of them might lead to more sales. This is why having multiple landing pages is a great strategy to improve the results of your funnel.

The bolded words are called coherence markers.

Below, I’ve illustrated the causal chain that has to be comprehended.

By using coherence markers, you’re making it easier to understand that these concepts are connected within a causal chain. This enhances the clarity, ease of processing, and the persuasion of your copywriting.

You can use coherence markers in two ways:

1. TO CREATE REFERENCE — Describe an object that you referred to in a previous sentence (e.g. we changed “landing page variations” to “two of them.”

2. TO CREATE RELATION — Convey a causal connection (e.g. therefore, this is why, because of this, etc.)

Most advertisers and corporate copywriters remove coherence markers from their copywriting because they do not add semantic meaning. But that’s *so* wrong!

In Kamalski (2007), researchers compared two variations of a Dove ad, with one ad including coherence markers and the other excluding them.

What they found was that coherence markers enhanced the clarity and persuasion of the ad. Just like they will for your copywriting, if you decide to include those subtle words and phrases throughout your copy.

This is because coherence markers connect ideas together, making causal chains easier to process and therefore improving the clarity and fluency of your writing.

STRATEGY #4 — BE AS DIVERSE AS POSSIBLE WITH YOUR WORDS

Let’s go back to the Hosman study for a second.

In the review, he explains the clear connection between persuasion and lexical diversity.

Which might lead you to ask…

“But Ves, how can a bigger diversity of word choices lead to more processing fluency, considering you’re trying to simplify your messaging as much as possible?”

Well, it doesn’t.

But as it turns out, readers will fancy your message more if it contains a larger variety of word choices.

In particular, let’s talk about something called the type-token ratio (TTR.)

Google defines TTR as “the total number of UNIQUE words divided by the total number of words (tokens) in a given segment of language.”

What Hosman discovered is that readers perceive messages with high TTR to be more interesting, and they tend be more favorable toward the communicator when he/she has a high TTR.

If your TTR is low, this means your vocabulary is redundant.

The higher your TTR is, the more diverse your vocabulary is, and therefore the more interesting your message is perceived as.

So while you should still avoid complex language, you can hit that sweet spot of simple (yet varied) word choices that will keep your message clear while making it feel more interesting.

--

--

Vesselin Malev
Vesselin Malev

Written by Vesselin Malev

Crypto content writer helping blockchain companies grow via no-fluff, educational content. | vesselinmalev.com

Responses (3)