To be effective, promotional language should leave the reader with no choice but to respond to it; it should stick in the reader's memory so that the response, once produced, does not die away again; and it should put the reader into a frame of mind in which he or she wants to act in the way you, the promoter, would wish. In other words, promotional language should be direct, memorable, and above all positive. Let us try to illustrate this kind of language by way of a specific example.Let us suppose that you belong to a club with its own clubhouse. Meetings are held and activities are staged in the house, and people sometimes make an effort to clean up after these events, but over the course of time the place gets dirtier and dowdier, and now it really needs to be spruced up. You are given, or volunteer for, the job of organizing the cleanup. You do not want to be the only one who turns up at the clubhouse with a mop and a scrub brush, so your first task is to generate some interest among the rest of the membership in participating in an event that is not in itself particularly enjoyable. In other words, you have to promote the cleanup. How might you go about this?Any operation you want to promote will benefit from being given a snappy title or heading. Remember that you need to grab the attention of your readers from the beginning, especially in an instance like this one, because only the most altruistic of them will look forward to giving some of their precious free time to come and clear spiderwebs from the ceiling. "Cleanup Saturday" might perhaps suggest itself. But perhaps you can do better than that. Among the various resources of language that have been discussed in previous sections is the ability of words to mean more than one thing, in other words their pun potential. There are various senses of the verb clean up that you could play on, for example: "Clean Up Saturday" could introduce an extended joke comparing the operation to a moral crusade; "Your Team Needs Cleanup Hitters" might appeal to the male members; "Clean Up This Saturday" with a continuation such as "Make a million dollars worth of difference to yourself and your friends" could be attractive (you are entitled to exaggerate somewhat for a good cause!).Now you have to turn to the matter at hand. When you are informing people of something, or asking them for something, be direct. Instead of saying,Volunteers are needed for a cleanup of the clubhouse on Saturday. orWe are having a cleanup of the clubhouse on Saturday. ask,Are you free next Saturday? orCan you help next Saturday? Or, instead of using a question, use a statement but still aim it directly at the person you are speaking to:We need you to help next Saturday. or evenYou have been specially selected to join an elite team of dynamic dirt busters next Saturday. Addressing people directly is more likely to arouse their interest and make them feel involved.What makes language memorable? This too is a question that has been discussed earlier. Language does not have to express a great thought or, indeed, be beautiful to be memorable. Slogans and advertising jingles, for example, are memorable, too. Generally speaking, they are memorable for the same reason that poetry or highly expressive prose is memorable: They exploit the possibilities of rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration. The human brain has a wonderful, or perhaps curious, susceptibility to musical combinations of words. If you say, If a job is not completed on schedule, then it might as well not be done at all, there is a chance that people may retain the message. But if you say, If it ain't done in time, it ain't worth a dime, people may wince at the trite folksiness of the expression, but there is a much better chance that, almost in spite of themselves, it will lodge in their memory. If you can coin a rhyme or an alliteration (dynamic dirt busters) or a rhythmic slogan (Turn out, join in, clean up), there is a better-than-even chance someone will remember it and repeat it to you before the operation is over.So be direct, be memorable. Be clear and simple, too. But, above all, be positive.
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