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The copywriter’s reader – how does your audience react to your words?

By Andrew Boulton

September 24, 2014 | 4 min read

How do you imagine people react when they read your copy? Do you envisage their Primark socks blown from their feet with astonishment and glee? Do you imagine them suggestively mashing their groin against a particularly pithy phrase? Do you simply picture them untidily carving off their own writing hand with a shatterproof ruler, shaking their dismembered fist at the gods that cursed them to write so very much more gauchely than you?

Most copywriters probably don’t imagine their writing prompting such unrestrained pleasure, but I suspect many of us wish to believe our words have affected someone in a positive sense. I have been told countless times that as a copywriter I should not be writing for my own satisfaction, but I’m not sure this can ever be entirely true. Even if the subject matter isn’t what we’d choose for ourselves, every copywriter I know is thrilled to receive admiration for a finely constructed message. In that respect at least, copywriters are unquestionably writing for their own sense of professional achievement.

What is an unsettling thought is that rather than our copy being enjoyed and admired (let alone acted upon), is that instead it goes entirely unnoticed. Tut at it, kick it, fling a selection of cold meats against it. Just read the damn thing. Flippancy aside, there is an undoubted sense of failure attached to copy that goes unread. I’m not sure I believe that it’s better for your copy to be read and hated than for no one to interfere with it on any level. I’d say both scenarios were equally bleak.

A lot of this comes back to an underlying confusion between being noticed and being read. Certain formats, structures and headline composition will draw the eye to the page in a purely mechanical sense. But looking and reading are as different as chalk and speedboats. The flipside, of course, being that magnificent copy that does nothing to encourage notice serves no purpose.

The grubby truth is that much of what we write may not be read, or at least not read to the extent we would hope for. Lines of copy are like wasps and films where Liam Neeson looks sad and punches people. There’s an awful lot of them. That’s not to say we shouldn’t continue to write with the intention of being memorable, clever and charming. It just means we have to give every possible reason for our words to be read. And give entirely no reason for someone to start but not finish what we write.

So don’t linger next to your copy in the public domain, snatching people from the street and pressing their terrified faces against your words until they tell you how remarkably talented you are. But do imagine how and when people will experience what you write and what that encounter could mean to them. They may not set fire to their own trousers as a tribute to your extraordinary phrasing. But you never know.

Follow Andrew Boulton on Twitter @Boultini

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