Holly here! I realized today as I was getting ready to post this that I was putting up a guest post from a French writer, getting ready to edit one from a Romanian writer, all while answering an email from the Philippines. Some days, my job is really amazingly cool.
Julie is back today talking about taglines, which is great! She does some great analysis, but I love her central point is that even if you’re not doing a ph.d in English Grammar like she is (yes, they really do have those in France, she says), you can still figure out how words and patterns work and turn them into a great tagline.
(A while ago, Holly had a cool post about taglines. She got me thinking about taglines a lot, and just today I found a gem. I wanted to share it with you)
I came across the personal finance blog www.doughroller.net. I couldn’t really use the advice of Michael, who blogs for an American audience about mortgages and overdraft protection, but nevertheless, I learned a ton from this blog. More specifically from its tagline: “Make more. Spend less. Invest the rest”.
Now if you’ll indulge me, I would like to analyse why this tagline is so great, from a writer’s point of view. Because yes, writers do have tools, and they don’t, or shouldn’t, rely only on inspiration. And I thought you might like to have a behind-the-scenes peep of what goes on when a wordsmith is at it.
So. Make more. Spend less. Invest the rest. Short, punchy, brilliant.
First of all it as a lot of action verbs, and I’m sure you know that action verbs are good for you. Plus, these verbs are in the imperative mood. Not “Making more, spending less”. Not “You should make more and spend less”. No: do this, do that. The guy is giving you orders, and his words convey a call to action. Well, this tagline doesn’t get you to click somewhere or subscribe to a newsletter or buy something, but you get all pumped up and excited, like “Yeah, man, bring it on!”. Which is always a good mood to put your readers into.
Then, you surely noticed the ternary rhythm: three verbs, three sentences. Three is always cool. Ask Caesar: he came, he saw, he conquered. Ask Churchill: blood, sweat and tears. Ask Earth Wind and Fire: Earth, Wind and… Anyway, you get the point.
On the level of symmetry, there are a lot of things going on as well.
- The sentences all begin with a verb.
- The words are all short.
- The first two verbs are one syllable.
- They’re both followed by an adverb, which is also one syllable long.
That’s four words of the same length. (Yay! I did bullet points! I’m a real blogger now! Yipee!)
Just a note: if you break into a cold sweat when you hear words like “imperative, verb, adverb”, well, don’t sweat it, really. You know subconsciously, even if you suck at English grammar, that “more” and “less” belong in the same category. They’re not like “make” and “spend”, they’re not like “Jane” and “Joe”, or “blue” and “nice”. You know they’re similar, and that’s all that counts. As a writer, I’m supposed to know the lingo. Feeling better now? Let’s go back to spotting the similarities.
So the first two sentences both are two words long, the words are all one syllable, the first word is always a verb, the second word is always an adverb.
Let’s now spot the differences: “more” and “less” are opposites. That’s really cool! Opposition in the middle of similarity! That makes for effective wording. Nice.
But the genius stroke is the last sentence: “Invest the rest”. First, it rhymes. Rhymes are always cool, but you already knew that. Rhymes are hot. Rockstars use rhymes and they get fan mail. That’s much better than lamer than lame taglines like “I’m loving it”. (By the way, I don’t know which agency got away with this line. As a writer, I’m offended. You mean people get PAID for such crap?)
Then, because English relies on stressing different syllables differently, there’s once again a nice symmetry effect: one unstressed syllable (In-, the), followed by a stressed syllable (-vest, rest). Gives a cool lilt to the sentence, “ta-dA, ta-dA”. This stress pattern, by the way, is called an iamb. Remember iambic pentameters? Well, iambs are the stuff of which iambic pentameters are made. You get five iambs in an iambic pentameter. Shakespeare used them. Shakespeare, and some dude writing about mortgages and overdraft protection. As a writer, I’m all for imitating the Bard. After all, he knew his stuff. He did write some cool taglines in his day.
And finally, the last sentence caps it off nicely because it’s longer than the first two, like a final flourish, but not just any kind of longer: exactly double the length of each of the first sentences. “Make more”? Two syllables. “Invest the rest”? Four syllables. At the same time it’s the same length as the first two sentences taken together: “Make more. Spend less.” Four syllables. That’s a nice stunt to pull, if you ask me.
And it’s three words long, and ternary rhythm is good but you already knew that. That’s quite a lot of wordsmithery packed into seven words. Yeah, writers are cool like that
Julie Gelleri is a French writer who currently lives in Ireland with her Hungarian husband. When she is not sorting out the cultural implications of this, she is busy starting an online writing business and working on her ph.d.
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