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Resuscitate Your Peeves – why every copywriter needs to revisit their copy hates

By Andrew Boulton

August 3, 2016 | 3 min read

At the end of an efficient, objective and utterly ruthless copy edit, most writers should be ankle deep in the dismembered gore of their prettiest, yet least productive, phrases. The need to ‘Kill your darlings’ in copywriting is a subject we’ve skidded across in these pages before – but what if there were a copywriting technique that demanded something quite different?

Resusitation

What if, instead of wildly butchering our pithiest follies, we were to resuscitate the wording we had buried long ago?

Copywriters, a lot like humans, are capricious and deeply arbitrary beats. As such, there are certain words, turns of phrase and even punctuation marks that we would classify dismissively as ‘peeves’. The mere presence of these peeves in other people’s copy brings about such a powerful state of sneering that many a disdainful copywriter has been hospitalised with a severe case of ‘scoff jaw’.

The same petty copywriters – admittedly, a party to which few of us were not invited – would sooner hurl their copy into a volcano crater that countenance the use of their most loathed words.

And yet this revulsion, like most prejudice, is a deafened and self-defeating state.

After all copywriting is seldom a matter of principle. Most of us, alphabetically speaking, operate in a vacuum. We are scalp hunters, gunrunners, contract hoodlums who will cheerily spill our words for all and any cause. We are inky soldiers of fortune and our spittle-flecked pencils are very much for hire.

So how do we, these scribbling mercenaries, have the pluck to toss out any word that aids us in our job for a reason no more compelling than rhetorical squeamishness?

What’s more, the words we dispense with are often worthy of our reassessment. Copywriters, fuelled by strong coffee and mid-afternoon bowls of Frosties, are ever-evolving creatures. The words that seemed trite and flimsy when we were younger, handsomer characters may now reveal, if not a hidden greatness, at least a newly appreciated purpose.

So while after we hacked away the limbs and organs of our ‘darlings’ perhaps it’s time to pump new air into the lungs of the dead, dusty words we’ve cast aside, to resurrect the departed remarks.

Just think of yourself as a word-based Jesus. Only with a lot more Frosties in your beard.

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