Mike’s Intro Message

When I visit sites promoting ebooks, especially sites offering books on how to write ebooks, I am often turned off immediately by the poor writing skills of the person who created the copy. I mean, after all, if they are going to try to sell me a book about some manner of writing–they should be pretty good at it themselves–right?

I don’t mean to sound overly didactic, and this isn’t meant to be a high school refresher course in composition, but you are judged by the words you write. So here are my top five mistakes I see on sales pages as related to grammar and composition.

1. FAULTY PARALLEL CONSTRUCTIONS
Example: This product will inform, motivate, and you will learn how to create your first ebook.

Problem: First break this sentence down into the three different ideas presented. Make each of these begin with the opening phrase of the sentence “This product will…”.

This product will inform.
This product will motivate.
This product will learn how to create your first ebook.

There are a number of problems here. Inform and motivate are both standard verbs. “To Create” is the infinitive form of the verb “create”. The verb forms don’t match. And–you can see that the third sentence given above makes no sense. It has a different structure from the first two.

The original sentence needs to be recast into something like…

This product will inform and motivate. It will show you how to create your first ebook.

2. USING COLONS AND SEMICOLONS
A colon says, I just said something and what follows immediately reinforces that statement. An example would be:

There are three reasons for failing in affiliate marketing: Failure to get traffic to your site, failure to convert visitors into buyers, and failure to promote a good product.

A semi-colon is a break in thought a little less definitive than a period, but more powerful than a comma. The phrase that follows a semi-colon must be able to stand alone as a complete sentence. Here is an example:

I have thought about writing a book for years; I need to get started soon. Notice that the phrase after the semi-colon could stand alone as a complete sentence. I need to get started soon.

3. SUBJECT/VERB AGREEMENT
Probably the most common place I see this is in using the contraction “there’s”. Of course “there’s” is a contracted form of the word combination “there is”. Examine the following sentence:

There’s a lot of ways to make money online. What this really says is, “There is a lot of ways to make money online.” The problem is that is, is a singular verb, while ways is a plural noun (it is the subject). What we need to do is to change the singular verb, is, into the plural verb are to go with the plural subject of the sentence ways.

4. DANGLING MODIFIERS
Examine the following sentence:

The flask broke while conducting the experiment, spilling acid on the lab desk.

The phrase, spilling acid on the lab table, is called a dangling modifier. It tries to attach to something, but it isn’t clear what that something is! The way the sentence is cast, it sounds like the flask was conducting the experiment. This is obviously not the case. Recasting the sentence into something like the following is more precise:

While I was doing the experiment the flask broke, thus spilling acid on the lab table.

5. COMMA FAULTS
A comma fault occurs when a comma is used to join two independent clauses to create a run-on sentence. Here is an example:

The concert was horrible, I wish we would have stayed home.

There are three ways to eliminate the comma fault in the improper sentence above.

a. Break it apart into two sentences…
The concert was horrible. I wish we would have stayed home.

b. Use a semi-colon to separate the clauses…
The concert was horrible; I wish I would have stayed home.

c. Replace the comma with a conjunction…
The concert was horrible and I wish I would have stayed home.