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One of the best copywriting exercises:
One of the best exercises you can do as a copywriter is to synthesize longer writing into shorter writing. Because—and this is almost always true—if you can rewrite something to say the same thing in fewer words, you’ve made the work better.
A great place to practice this is Wikipedia.
Try rewriting a Wikipedia paragraph to a third of its original length without sacrificing the meaning.
For example, edit ~150 words down to ~50 words. This is an ultra-effective exercise because concision is already baked into Wikipedia’s publication rules, which state, “Articles should use only necessary words. This does not mean using fewer words is always better; rather, when considering equivalent expressions, choose the more concise.”
In other words, the platform already has a strict no-fluff policy—and that’s what makes this practice so productive. Editing an already concise paragraph for brevity demands hypersensitivity to syntax, to sentence structure, to the weight of each word.
It puts your editing brain into overdrive, forcing a mindset so unnatural you’ll walk away from each exercise a markedly more concise writer.
For example:
I synthesized this 175-word paragraph from HubSpot’s Wikipedia page:
HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2006. Shah invested $500,000, which was followed by angel investments from Edward B. Roberts, the chair of the Entrepreneurship Center at MIT and fellow MIT Sloan classmate and Entrepreneur Brian Shin. The company introduced the HubSpot software in beta in 2006 and officially launched it in December 2007. An additional $5 million in funding was raised in 2007, which was followed by $12 million in May 2008, and $16 million in late 2009. The company grew from $255,000 in revenues the first year the software was released to $15.6 million in 2010. Later that year HubSpot announced its acquisition of one-forty, which began as an app store for Twitter, but shifted into an online resource for social media marketing. The company also introduced new software for personalizing websites to each visitor. According to Forbes, HubSpot started out targeting companies of 1–10 employees, but “moved steadily upmarket to serve larger businesses of up to 1000 employees.”
Into a 51-word paragraph:
Founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at MIT in 2006, HubSpot received a series of multi-million dollar capital injections that helped it grow more than 60X by its fourth year of business. That same year, HubSpot announced its acquisition of oneforty, introduced new website-personalization software, and began targeting enterprise businesses.
Try it.
Do it once a day, five days a week for a month, and your writing will drastically improve.
Do it once a day, five days a week for a year, and the quality of your writing will surpass that of many professional copywriters.
