Three letters. THREE LETTERS! That sums up 2018’s best copywriting
You see it. You get it. And if you were counting on the Colonel that week, you can’t help but give them a pass for their fowl fail, because they made you laugh. So you’ll go back.
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We get asked for writing advice all the time; from clients, students and the occasional family member. And while each request requires a different approach, some pieces of writing advice are universal.
Getting to know quips and brilliances from Oscar Wilde is one of those universals.
Read the full article…A few years ago, we were bouncing around the idea of replacing “Choose Your Words Wisely.” In retrospect, it was a silly exercise because we have a great tagline. But one alternative we quite liked was “Well said. Well read.”
It was objectively good: catchy, well-balanced, thought-provoking. We knew it (or an iteration of it) would find a home somewhere.
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Content marketing, as an industry, is obsessed with best practices to ensure effective content, not enjoyable content:
– This is how many keywords you need
– This is the keyword frequency you should be aiming for
– This is the time of day you should post
– This is the blah b-blah b-blah
In 2001, researchers studied how background music affected the quality of people’s writing. The findings showed that “background music significantly disrupted writing fluency” — a fairly cut-and-dry case for writing in silence.
Unless you’re one of those people who finds silence louder than noise. Or you’re the kind of person who feeds off secondary sensory stimulation (creativity in one area is heightened by exposure to creativity in another). In fact, many non-professionals forced into copywriting or copyediting find secondary sensory stimulation to be helpful in tackling the task at hand and feeling good about the results.
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Smart businesses seek out the services of a copy editor because everyone in a company can use a second set of eyes.
Yes, you want to avoid embarrassing mistakes, but that’s more the job of a proofreader (we do that too, by the way). A copy editor will make sure you’re conveying what you think you’re conveying, and that you’re doing it in the best way possible.
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We build revision cycles into our copywriting quotes because we expect client feedback. We like to think we provide our clients with the best ways to phrase their messages, but they’re certainly not the only ways. And because our clients (a) know better than we do what they want and (b) know their business better than we do until we’ve been working with them long enough, their feedback is tremendously valuable and almost always makes the work better.
Notice how we said almost always.
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As copywriters, we immerse ourselves in our clients’ businesses. We get to know everything about them because it’s our job to essentially become them. We assume their voice, their tone and manner, and their personality. Their aspirations become our aspirations. Their promises become our promises. And their customers become our customers.
We essentially lose ourselves in them. It’s part of the job, and it’s a fun part of the job.
Read the full article…Mark Twain: “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable.”
Here are the Merriam-Webster definitions of an adjective and an adverb. They’re long, but here’s a summary: an adjective’s role is to describe a noun while an adverb’s role is to modify a verb or adjective.
Read the full article…Translation is a super-growth industry. Data from the US Department of Labourshows a 100 percent increase in the number of people employed in the translation industry over the past seven years, and 24 percent more translation companies.
And wherever you find growth, you inevitably find Google in the middle of it. Last week on a conference call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google Translatetranslates a staggering 143 billion words every day — for free.
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