Write It Right: Part 2
Copy the great copywriters or lose your readers
Vol. 6, Issue No. 24 | December 21, 2010 By Denny Hatch
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IN THE NEWS
Justices Are Long on Words but Short on GuidanceWASHINGTON - In June, the Supreme Court issued a decision on the privacy rights of a police officer whose sexually explicit text messages had been reviewed by his employer. Ever since, lower court judges have struggled to figure out what the decision means ...
Justice Antonin Scalia went along with the decision, but he blasted his colleagues for “issuing opaque
opinions” ...
Brown v. Board of Education, the towering 1954 decision that held segregated public schools unconstitutional, managed to do its work in fewer than 4,000 words. When the Roberts court returned to just an aspect of the issue in 2007 in Parents Involved v. Seattle, it published some 47,000 words, enough to rival a short novel. In more routine cases, too, the court has been setting records. The median length of majority opinions reached an all-time high in the last term.
—Adam Liptak
The New York Times, Nov. 17, 2010
Editor's Note: In September 2009, I wrote a Business Common Sense e-newsletter titled Write It Right: What authors can learn from the great copywriters. Now I have more to say on the topic.
Back in 2003, I sent a book proposal to several mainstream publishers, and it was rejected out of hand. The title:
"WRITE IT RIGHT: What Authors Can Learn from the Great Copywriters."
"My authors have nothing to learn from advertising copywriters," a senior editor a W.W. Norton sniffed.
I wasn't going to take months out of my life writing a book on spec and then spend a lot more time trying get it published. So, I consigned the project to the recesses of my computer and went on to other things.
Over the years I kept seeing serious lapses in communication skills by people who should know better, the most recent being the United States Supreme Court. (See "IN THE NEWS" at right.)
Members of the Supreme Court are among the most highly educated and literate men and women in America. Their business is linguistic precision. If their decisions are not understood, they are failures.
Whether creating a letter, legal brief, court decision, memo, e-mail, blog, special report, proposal, press release, advertisement, article for publication or a full-blown book, we are all authors.
And the greatest challenge to an author is capturing the reader's attention and holding it.
In my opinion, the way to learn how to write is to study the tested and proven attention-getting (and attention-holding) secrets of the elite, anonymous cadre of highly-paid (six- and seven figures a year) advertising copywriters who mobilized the English language and sent it off to sell.
"I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing," said Philip Dusenberry, Chairman, BBDO North America. "The first, of course, is ransom notes."
"Life Is One Long Sales Pitch."
"In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create," wrote advertising legend David Ogilvy. "Management cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman."
Takeaways to Consider
- "I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes." —Philip Dusenberry
- Are you writing for yourself or for your reader?
- Ruthlessly self-edit, because most folks in business do not have professional editors to tidy up their work.
- Delete anything that could get the reader off subject.
- Are you giving useful background information, or are you showing off how much you know?
- "Writing is easy, all you have to do is cross out the wrong words."
—Mark Twain - Avoid "gray walls of type."
- Break up long passages with subheads, crossheads and new paragraphs.
- "Use short words, short sentences, short paragraphs." —Andrew J. Byrne
- "It takes hard writing to make easy reading." —Robert Louis Stevenson
- "'What's all this business of being a writer? Just putting one word after another.' My reply was, 'Pardon me, Mr. [Irving] Thalberg—putting one right word after another.'"
—Lenore Coffee (1896-1984), American screenwriter, playwright, novelist - "I don't know the rules of grammar ... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular." —David Ogilvy
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