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People keep asking me how I get away with this
People often ask me how I get away with writing long, winding, never-ending run-on sentences in my emails.
Half the time it doesn't look like it should work, but it does.
While everyone else out there is writing five- or seven-word sentences, then adding a period.
Leaving a big huge blank line.
Then adding another five-word sentence, followed by a period.
And another huge blank line.
I actually like a lot of the people who do this by the way. Many of them are great people. And they seem to be doing well in business too. Like they genuinely know what they’re doing when it comes to building an audience, making offers, solving problems, etc…
But I open their emails, start reading, get bored, and leave.
Their stories and writing often start out fine. I’ll get pulled in by a subject line, sucked into what seems like a genuinely interesting opener, but half-way down the page I find myself thinking: Just get to the point already.
Not because I’m impatient, or that I don’t like reading, or like I said, that the story didn’t start out interesting.
But it’s because at some point, the rhythm of writing loses me. The flow stops going somewhere. And suddenly I no longer feel like I’m being taken on a journey.
It’s like an elevator going up one floor… Ding!
Then another… Ding!
And another… Ding!
But there’s still a hundred floors to go.
Now instead, imagine you’re on a roller coaster. It’s click-clacking away as it ratches you ever so slowly to the top of that first drop. Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack. You watch your friends grip the handrail tightly.
You inch forward, peer out over the edge, and you can feel it as the the whole string of cars is about to go. And once they do, there’s no going back.
You’re on a ride…
That's what varying your sentence length does to a reader.
Short sentences are great. It’s like opening your email with blast beats. But string twenty back-to-back and you don't have a melody anymore, you have a metronome. Click click click click, all the way down the page, until your reader quietly closes the tab and goes back to watching Reels.
If you want to keep people reading, you have to take them on a journey.
And then, sometimes, when you've given them enough short punchy beats to get the rhythm going, you hit them with a sentence so long and so alive with momentum that it just keeps carrying them forward, past every period they expected to find, around every corner they thought would end it, until suddenly they realize they've read the whole damn thing and now they're at the bottom of your email looking for the link.
Which is here:
Talk soon,
Kevin Hood