Adventures in Copywriting: World’s Top 8 Largest Metaphors
Welcome to the metaphor — a literary device that compares one thing as another. Often described as “writing pictures”? And that’s what metaphors are all about — translating abstract concepts into concrete visuals. Here are eight that top the pops for size, weight and distribution.
Adventures in Copywriting: From cliché to flipché
Cliches began life as a skillful telegraphing of a thought with precision words. Flip a cliche 380 degrees and you get a fresh new and surprising take on a cliché that is now a flipché.
Adventures in Copywriting: Nine popster answers to “how are you?”
Hi how are you? Rather than the usual “okay” as you walk on by each other, we look at nine catchy alternatives based on popular song titles. Because like good copywriting headlines, good song titles encapsulate the mood, idea or situation in a few tasty words.
Adventures in Copywriting: Why Quote Einstein When You Can Quote Yourself
Perhaps the most challenging (but definitely most rewarding) of all writing is to compose an original thought in the form of a quote. You only have to write one to experience the exhilaration of “poetic champions composing” (to quote Van Morrison).
The Copywriter’s Roadmap for Moving Story Forward
One of the biggest questions asked by participants in my copywriting course is: How do you structure a piece of writing? It’s only when you apply structure to an entire piece of work from start to finish, and do it at least three times, will you “get structure” to map your way forward.
The Four Purposes of Writing
No matter the target audience; no matter the subject; no matter the medium; the craft of copywriting employs all four purposes in the one sitting. Unlike all other forms of writing, copywriting is conversing with a reluctant, impatient and, quite likely, skeptical target audience. You can easily lose them any sentence along the way. That’s where all four purposes of writing combined keep them interested.
The Craft of Copywriting and Narrative Logic
Think of it as a spine. This is more obvious in multi-page documents like brochures and white papers, where each section is a vertebrae in the overall structure (over-arching story). However, the same metaphor can be applied to a one page, long form piece such as articles, web copy and blog posts. And that’s what we will focus on here.
Biological Fact: Copywriting is Music.
Can you hear the rhythm in your sentences (like the beats in a song)?
Can you hear the tonal attitude that characterizes your expressions (like the spirit of a vocalist or instrumentalist)?
Can you hear the rhetorical patterns that shape your clauses and phrases into memorable sound bytes (like the catchy riff of a melody)?
Can you feel the tension, the climax and the denouement build-up, then resolve as each sentence moves story forward?
Copywriting and the Three Stages of Editing
Let’s begin by scrapping the misconception that “editing” and “proofreading” are one and the same. There are three stages to the editing process and they are, in order of procedure, as follows:
1] Structural Editing (the big picture edit as performed by a Structural Editor)
2] Copy Editing (the line by line edit as performed by a Copy Editor)
3] Proofreading (picking up any errors missed by the first two edits as performed by a Proofreader)
Tone is Attitude; Attitude is Tone.
The clearer your attitude, the better your writing. Whatever your view/feeling, it’s going to come through your writing and colour your words in a particular shade of tonality.