Remember those rules you learned in elementary school about proper grammar and punctuation? Well I’ve got good news for you …

… Just throw the rules away.

When you’re writing sales copy, you need to speak to prospects in a way that they’re used to being spoken to and in the same way that they speak to other people.

So depending on who your market is, you have a very broad range of both word choices and punctuation available to you.

I use punctuation to try to make my copy sound in the prospect’s head the same way it would sound as if I was speaking this to him.

What we do is salesmanship in print, right? So I’m writing to my prospect as if I were in the room with him and my word choices, my phraseology, everything is crafted to make him comfortable with me.

One of the best things that you can do is to read your sales copy aloud. When you’ve got a pretty good draft, just sit in a room by yourself and read it out loud. Imagine that you’re talking to your ideal prospect as you’re reading it.

You’ll find that there are certain areas where words are lost because of lack of emphasis. Or passages that seem a little jumbled. Or places where you stumble over the phrasing. Or sections that just slow the reader down.

Highlight those sections and when you’re done, go back to them and work on them.

Let’s just go through some of the ways that I use punctuation -- just some things to think about.

Punctuation Non-Rule #1: I use commas in my sentences to create pauses. Again, we’re thinking about this printed sales copy as though it were verbal. A conversation we’re having with our prospect.

Punctuation Non-Rule #2: I use ellipses in a sentence or a paragraph to air out a longer string of thoughts or progression of thoughts.

I just did an e-mail blast this morning, for example, on China and about how inflation is heating up in China and the effects that would have.

It went something like:

“Yesterday the Chinese government announced that inflation will nearly double …

“Two billion Chinese are now looking for ways to hedge their new-found wealth against inflation …

“Is it any wonder gold prices are soaring?”

Punctuation Non-Rule #3: I use dashes to emphasize a thought within a thought in a sentence.

Punctuation Non-Rule #4: I use colons when I want to really point to the following text in a strong way – like before headlines in my eyebrow or pre-head copy.

Punctuation Non-Rule #5: I use caps and italics in text to create emphasis for certain words. In print, you use underlines quite often, but on the web, underline means, “This is a link.” And so most people avoid using them on the web. But all cap words and italics serve the same purpose.

Punctuation Non-Rule #6: I make sure that my use of exclamation points is judicious. I’ll go through my final draft and make sure that I don’t end two or three paragraphs in a row with exclamation points. When everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.

In the end, you want your sales copy to go through variations in pacing and amplitude -- where it goes from more intense to less intense so that the next peak can be more dramatic.

Punctuation Non-Rule #7: The comma test. When I see a lot of commas, I take a hard look at the sentence because commas are quite often used to try to repair sentences that were really written upside down.

For example, I could write, “With great bravado, Clayton gave his example.”

Well, that sentence is upside down and that’s why it needed the comma. It should have said, “Clayton gave his example with great bravado.”

So that’s a clue that there’s work to be done to make that sentence read more quickly and efficiently.

I hope this helps!