Inside the Mind of a Freelance Copywriter

Of headaches and marketing babble

Sometimes people write words that mean nothing at all. And racking your brains on nothing is just like trying to divide by zero. All you end up with is a blinding headache.

That’s just what happened to Lewis Green when he read this article called Top 10 Marketing Processes for the 21st Century. Lewis’ blog post about his experience reminded me of a Richard Dawkins article called Postmodernism Disrobed, a review of the book Intellectual Impostors by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Richard doesn’t mince his words in his insightful opening paragraph.

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.

Take this quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, for example.

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

Enough to give you a bad migraine on a good day! Maybe people like this are just hoping that when you give up trying to figure it out, you’ll assume that you’re the dumb one and leave it at that. The best cure for this kind of headache is prevention and the trash bin is the doctor I’d recommend.

Of course the very same thing happens in advertising - not necessarily because there is nothing to say about a company or product, but because the marketers don’t dig deep enough to find the gold. Sometimes it’s down to there not being enough budget for proper research, other times it’s just lazy marketers to blame. After all it’s easier to weave a web of spin than to build upon solid, convincing facts.

Take the trouble to make every communication with your prospects and clients as clear and meaningful as possible. Find out what you really want to say and carefully choose the best words to express your ideas in a way that is easy to understand.

Of course you can be creative! And by all means use words that conjure vivid images in your reader’s mind. But make sure that the solid foundations your argument is based on show through. Your audience will respect and trust you for that.

October 19th, 2006 TrackBack URI