Tutorial 25: 22 ideas for keeping your reader moving on.
Keep in mind these principles when you write long letters.
- Written by
- Jerry Huntsinger
- Added
- February 04, 2019
The following principles are particularly relevant in the context of writing long letters.
- Try telling a story and let the thread of the narrative flow through the entire letter.
- Try the question and answer approach, with each question involving a ‘yes’ answer.
- Keep your paragraphs short. Usually a block of print of more than six lines discourages the eye from moving on. Several long paragraphs coming one after the other discourage reading.
- Throw in a one-line paragraph for emphasis.
- Indent key phrases and quotations.
- Try to highlight key thoughts by underlining them with a felt pen so that the letter can be scanned by following the underlining.
- Use action verbs, active tenses.
- Stay away from redundant adverbs and don’t continually further qualify helplessly sick adjectives with words ending in ‘ly’.
- Use good old pictorial nouns and a simple vocabulary. This is not necessarily because your people are simple, but because that’s the only way you can get their attention.
- Don’t use words people can’t easily pronounce. This blocks the flow of the letter.
- And don’t moralise. That also blocks the flow.
- Try using trigger words that have special meaning to your particular mailing list. And sprinkle these key words throughout the copy.
- Use simple sentence constructions.
- Use connectives between paragraphs to keep the reader moving on (therefore ... but ... so you see ... and then when ... here’s how ... ).
- In a letter more than two pages, break the progression of ideas into logical steps, then number each step and indent each number.
- Try putting the reader into the letter: ‘Picture yourself lying in the street waiting for the ambulance to arrive.’
- Don’t let the copy wander just because you have extra space. Search for more exciting material.
- Stay with your purpose. If your goal is to balance the budget don’t shift to deferred giving.
- Try using a deadline and build a case for action before the deadline expires.
- Experiment with handwritten marginal notes, maybe in red ink.
- Read your copy aloud and, when you stumble, smooth out the language.
- And, most important of all, write about a flesh and blood person – not an idea or a programme.
© SOFII Foundation 2010-2014.
Gwen Chapman is a passionate advocate for donor-centric fundraising. She is a senior consultant with international experience in the non-profit sector in Canada, the United States, the UK and South Africa. She explains the importance to these tutorials 
