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Words are easy (finding the compelling message is the tricky bit)

By Andrew Boulton

August 11, 2015 | 4 min read

'So, what do you do?’ asks some faceless polo shirt at pretty much every social event I have ever been to. In the early years I was foolish enough to reply with ‘Well, I’m actually a copywriter’. A decade of polite, but barely-concealed, bewilderment has taught me that, if you have a job that takes longer than the consumption of a miniature pork pie to explain, you are effectively barbecue leprosy. Generally, I find the easiest way to steer people back from the crippling awkwardness of an idiot with a baffling job is to tell them I work with words. ‘Oh words’ they’ll say gratefully, ‘I see now’. And they sort of do.

Except they also sort of don’t (not that I’d ever be foolish enough to prolong one of these agonising mingles with something as mutually flesh mortifying as an explanation).

Words are a copywriter’s business, but in many ways that’s the easiest part. Designers I work with frequently scoff that a copywriter can get by with knowing around 60 words and a handful of punctuation marks. Imagine that, biting wit and the ability to colour things in as well. Remarkable people.

But the truth is my design pals are not a million miles away from the truth. While copywriting is not some elaborate shuffling of fridge magnets, it is a discipline that often relies upon the ability to deliver a message in the clearest way. What that often leads to are phrases and sentence constructs that do reappear time and again, purely because trying to express that same point in a different way often leads to jumbled and incoherent writing.

Naturally that’s not to say copywriters dip exclusively into their knapsack of trusty phrases, for copywriting is as much about complex imagination as it is about simple expression.

The fuel for that imagination is the beginning and middle of any copywriting job. Examining a brief to extract that one compelling message is, at the risk of sounding horribly overcooked, an act of creative forensics. The greatest copywriters, in my experience, are not necessarily the ones that invariably use the most delicious or surprising words. They’re the ones who have found the most engaging way to make it very hard for people not to point their eyes in our direction.

To think about copywriting purely as the selection and manipulation of words is like seeing marathon runners as experts in tying shoelaces, or congratulating an astronaut on being really good at floating. The craft of copywriting is in making people think, if only for a second. The mechanics of copywriting is the familiar bits of alphabet you shuffle around to give that purpose every chance of being realised.

But if there’s one piece of advice I would be presumptuous enough to pass on it’s this: when a stranger asks you what you do for living, there are only two words you will ever really need. Bear. Jockey. Job done.

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