Four ways to improve your copywriting vocabulary

Published: June 2024

A friendly black dog towers over a tiny brown dog.
When it comes to persuasive writing, bigger is sometimes better.
To write copy that sells, do you need a good vocabulary?

Some people say you don’t. They say that good writing uses words that are simple, and everyone knows all the simple words.

There are indeed many obscure words like furnish that can almost always be replaced with simpler words like give. We recommend a useful guide from the Plain English Campaign called The A–Z of Alternative Words, which helps you replace complex words with simpler ones. Here are a few examples that it suggests:

  • Allow is simpler than authorize.
  • So is simpler than consequently.
  • Agree is simpler than acquiesce.
  • Later is simpler than subsequently.
  • Improve is simpler than ameliorate.

Simple words work, but that’s not the whole story.

The difference between your active and passive vocabulary

We each have two types of vocabulary: an active one and a passive one.

  1. Your active vocabulary contains the words you use.
  2. Your passive vocabulary contains the words you never use but understand when you read or hear them.

The average adult’s passive vocabulary is much larger than their active one—some say ten times larger. Which means that your active vocabulary is probably missing many powerful words and phrases that everyone understands (and could improve your conversion rate).

So even though you have no trouble understanding the following sentence…

“Hurry! These places are first-come-first-served, so seize the opportunity while it’s still fresh in your mind.”

…you may have never written some of those italicized words.

Great copywriters understand the value of simplicity but make a point of moving persuasive words from their passive vocabulary to their active vocabulary.

Four simple activities that will grow your passive vocabulary

A huge word cloud reveals all the use cases of copywriting. Entries include marketing, SEO, headlines, branding, blogs, ads, and emails.
The ability to write persuasive copy is a core skill of conversion rate optimization.

Here are several ways to grow your active vocabulary:

  1. When you read something that moves you to action, note the words the writer used. Ask yourself whether you would have used them.
  2. Create a blank document called “Active vocabulary” and use it to store useful words—and phrases—as you come across them. For example, we recently added “Busy?” to ours. Clearly, we already knew the word busy, but we noticed that it was powerful when used at the start of a call to action, such as “Busy? Call our experts for free advice.” Those five characters do a lot of work.
  3. Immerse yourself in good copywriting. Persuasive copy is a language, and you learn it the same way you learn any language—by immersion. Read landing pages, ads, and anything you can find that was written by copywriters who A/B tested what they created. Our Copywriting Friday series—which unpacks the tools, techniques, and thinking used in many of our winning tests—is a great place to start.
  4. Learn the language of your customers (using these research techniques), rather than the language of your industry. We regularly increase our clients’ sales by replacing their industry terminology with the words that their customers actually use.

Do those four things and your copy will ameliorate like crazy.

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