P.S. I think you are stupid.
By Alan Sharpe
Call me a heretic, but I think the PS in direct mail
letters is stupid and belongs in another millennium.
The postscript, after all, is a vestige of a day long
gone when folks wrote letters by hand or composed them
on typewriters. In those days, if you completed your
letter and then suddenly had another thought that you
wanted to include, you had two choices.
The first was to re-write or re-type your letter,
which wasn't really a choice at all. And the second
choice was to add a "postscript," a term that derives
from the Latin phrase "to write after." A postscript
is simply a note appended to a completed letter.
And that's the problem I have with the modern PS. Word
processors make the PS obsolete. After all, what do you
do when you get to the end of your letter and want to
add a thought? You search for the best place in the letter
for your addition, and then add the thought. You don't type
it after your signature as a PS for the same reason that
you don't re-type your letter to accommodate an addition.
Because that would be dumb.
I know what you are thinking. "But the PS," you say,
"has been proven in studies to be one of the first things
that people read in a direct mail letter." That may be true.
Or that may have been true, once upon a time.
Yes, I've read Caples and Stone and the other experts who
argue for keeping this anachronism. But I still think the
PS is stupid, even deceitful. The PS used to be a genuine,
honest thought that someone added to a letter. Now it is a
contrived device calculated to do nothing more than lift
response. Today's PS is not a PS at all. And that's my final
word on the matter.
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Alan Sharpe is a direct mail copywriter, speaker and
sales lead generation specialist. Alan helps businesses generate sales and
secure sales meetings with qualified prospects using cost-effective, compelling direct mail marketing.
Subscribe to "Sharpe & Direct," his weekly
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at www.sharpecopy.com. Browse the best direct mail books,
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