It’s no wonder I have a permanent crick in my neck. I’ve spent
last ten years shaking my head piteously at people who think they can write. Fellow scribes, let us gather now for a virtual group hug, as we console each other for fruitlessness that is our existence. Okay, I’m being a little dramatic. But it’s true; innumerous individuals think they don’t need my services. Guess again, friends! You need writer. I’ve seen what happens when you give it a go on your own, and it isn’t pretty.
To my copywriting cohorts: you know who I mean. They’re ones who keep you hunched over that keyboard, slogging away into wee hours of morning, only to send back a bastardized draft revision that’s rife with bad grammar, sloppy sentence structure and headlines that wouldn’t fly in an eighth grade English essay. What’s a writer to do? Work your magic, of course! I never thought I had special powers. But maybe I do, because that’s what pandering types tell me just after they’ve grammatically raped another one of my brainchildren. Little do they know, painstaking way in which copywriter chooses his words!
Good copywriting carries some emotional weight; that’s what gives it substance. The challenge an advertiser faces is to harness emotion of audience and spur them to action. Still, people often fail to recognize there’s a distinct method to madness. They tamper with your creation; they muck up your words; they carelessly trod upon your masterpiece! You protest, gently, but still they always win. Why? You can’t prove them wrong. You can only barrage them with more words. See how confusing it becomes?
In writing, there are two partners at play; emotion, and logic. Emotion is silly-putty of communication; logic is that little plastic container you keep it in. I’ll say it another way: word choice and sentence structure. The problem is such: there is no tangible way to defend your emotional method of persuasion (or word choice), and as language continues to evolve, logic (or sentence structure) is also going out window.
