What is a great fundraising sentence like?

I came across the following sentence the other day. It took my breath away... When he was eighteen and was leaving home for the first time, Ralph Wyman was counseled by his father, principal of Jefferson Elementary School and trumpet soloist in the Weaverville Elks Club Auxiliary Band, that life was a very serious matter, an enterprise insisting on strength and purpose in a young person just setting out, an arduous undertaking, everyone knew that, but nevertheless a rewarding one, Ralph Wyman's father believed and said. It's the opening sentence to the short story, "Will You Please Be Quite, Please?" by Raymond Carver. It's a stunning sentence. Packed with specific and implied information about the main character. A great sentence, but not if it were in a fundraising message. At 72 words, it's just too long for easy reading. With apologies to one of the greatest short story writers of all time, I've edited the sentence as if it were to be in a piece of direct mail. See what you think: When Ralph Wyman left home for the first time at 18, his father -- an elementary school principal -- had some advice: "Life is a very serious matter. An arduous undertaking, but a rewarding one. A young person just setting out needs strength and purpose. Everyone knows that." The senseless violence I've committed on that sentence almost makes me physically ill. But it's a little easier to read now. My point: There are many different kinds of "good writing." What's great in one context could be awful in another. A lot of people writing fundraising struggle with this. Because they come from some other type of writing, a different genre that has different conventions and goals than fundraising writing. Often it's journalism, academic writing, formal business writing, technical writing ... All of these require skill and study. But if you bring the skills of these other genres to fundraising, you won't be a good fundraising writer. Raymond Carver -- an absolute master at his craft -- would have been disastrously bad at fundraising. (Or maybe not. I've noticed that good writers are usually aware of and in control of voice and conventions; Carver might have been able to modify his "fiction" voice and write amazing fundraising!) If you learned how to write in a genre other than fundraising (and almost everyone did), you have some re-learning to do before you'll be a great fundraising writer. There's no shame in that. The shame is being too inflexible to adapt to the world of fundraising. It's a quick path to frustration and failure.

from Future Fundraising Now https://ift.tt/2IVsOa3