I’m working on updating some of my marketing material. I typed out a few paragraphs and then put it into an e-mail to send to someone for feedback.

Looking at the pasted text in the e-mail, I realized a sentence in one paragraph might be a candidate for getting chopped. So just to make things easier, I separated all paragraphs into single-sentence paragraphs. I figured it might make it easier for the other person to either comment on the copy or to line it out if it was weak.

Wow! What a difference that made in evaluating the effectiveness of each and every sentence. I don’t know if it will help the person I’m sending the copy to. But I suddenly had a much better sense of whether each sentence was pulling its own weight.

As many of you know, I can write long articles full of long paragraphs. But that does make it harder to see where there might be waste.

When it comes to your marketing copy, waste is a bad thing.

So this tip might be something to try with the copy on your website. Copy and paste it into some other document, then break paragraphs into single sentences. Looking at those sentences by themselves should make it much easier to see if it has any value to your overall message. (And when you’re done, feel free to put things back into paragraph form. I’m not suggesting your sales copy is completely single-sentence paragraphs.)