I agree that some copy ought to be simple – short copy or headlines, for example – but that shouldn’t mean that all copy should be stripped-back and dried-out. There’s nothing pretentious about semi-colons; they bring clarity and elegance.

The most commonly employed function of the semi-colon is separating groups of items in a list. Using our winking friend brings clarity to a list, distinguishing items that are already connected with commas. For example:

This summer, I took a road-trip through Toronto, Ontario; Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Morgantown, West Virginia.

There can be no confusion about which towns are in which states and provinces. You might be thinking that I shouldn’t have used a semi-colon before the ‘and’, but using it ensures there are no snags or snares for the reader; if I had left it out, there might be a brief moment when the reader thought that Pittsburgh straddled the border of two states; or that I had invented a new state called ‘Pennsylvania and Morgantown. The smallest snags make the copy less readable; they are the enemy of good writers.

There’s no need to be economical with punctuation marks; they are tools to help wordsmiths in their craft. Good punctuation is an art-form: it transforms writing into something extraordinary; it helps an author speak in different voices; it thumps meter and drama into our writing.

The second usage of a semi-colon is not unrelated to that described above: it forms a continuos list of ideas. Like the full-stop, we can use it to end a sentence; but instead of dividing each sentence from another – as the full-stop does – the semi-colon allows the sentences to flow from each other; implying that there is a connection between the statements on each side of them – almost like a list. When you reach a semi-colon, it invites you to read-on; skilfully revealing more about an idea; taking you deeper.

Hemingway wrote with a very deliberate tightness. His sentences are ‘economical’. His punctuation firm. He controls every breath and carefully measures each moment. He had little time for semi-colons.

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally ‘salao’, which was the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish in the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks, and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. (The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway, 1952)

Wonderful stuff. Corey Stoll really brought Hemingway to life in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris; when I read him now, I hear Stoll’s voice. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpLEKjPud_k)

Using semi-colons is more an expression of style than correctness. I suppose we could replace it with a full-stop or a dash, but there is a subtle difference between these marks: they speak with other voices; if they were the same, why have a semi-colon at all?

Copywriting briefs often talk about ‘voice’ and ‘tone’; it’s important that communications speak in the right ways to their intended audience. Semi-colons imitate how we talk to each other; we use them almost constantly in conversation. Imagine how odd we would sound if we all talked like Hemingway in the passage above, or as he does in Midnight in Paris; it would be really strange. We would all sound extremely, well, Ernest.

Join me in my quest to rescue the semi-colon and bring verve back into our writing. Let’s extend our sentences and make them more expressive; connecting them in beautiful tumblings of consciousness; restoring a human voice back to the written word. Just be careful not to get carried away: they’re very addictive.

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There I would sit, strumming my heart out, letting words and music fuse, and tumble out of myself. When the improvised songs were finished, my friends would offer their reviews: “Wow. That really sounded like This-Band, or That-Song.” My heart would sink. I felt generic. It was nothing but imitation.

For years, I was hounded by this thought. It would bark at me whenever I picked up my guitar or began thinking about writing stories. Until it struck me that the pursuit of originality had been the single biggest obstacle for my passenger, and I finally coined a new mantra:

Originality is the Enemy of Creativity.

Ironically, it might be the most original piece of writing I have ever done, but to research it would mean waking a sleeping dog. It’s not important whether anyone else said it; if they did it only means I have channeled a deeper wisdom – wisdom that speaks from shared human experience.

We cannot escape our influences any more than we can escape our subjective perception of reality. We have each been influenced by thousands of people, thoughts, ideas and beliefs and they have shaped the way we think and, most importantly, create.

It is not a crime to allow the many-voices of your human experience to reveal themselves in your own creations because – here lies the rub – everything we write is original by virtue of being written by you. Your collected influences are the very things that will make your work unique when compared with anyone else’s You are a library of differences; how could your work not be original?

Don’t look for a contradiction here. Originality is the enemy of Creativity. It comes so easily that it can be found in everything we do. Some of our work might be quite derivative (although this word has judgmental undertones), or more heavily influenced that other works, but these are the least constructive reviews of a work. Originality is the cheapest commodity in our world, and it is not worth a second thought.

Create for the love of it. Create because a part of you needs it. Create because nobody else could ever do it for you.

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Today the world is different; teenage obsession is different; but the “Problem of Other Minds” persists.

On a recent family visit, I bore witness to the hormonal horror of my young sister-in-law’s boy-band obsession. Once I had recovered from the frosty-tickle of old-age that “I’ve never heard of All Star Weekend” precipitated – nobody else knows who-the-f**k they are either – I watched with a strange fascination as the girl’s world was turned upside-down by a tweet.

Near mania pursued; my sister’s favourite band “followed” the virtual parps and scribbles of the micro-blog that she fed the Twitter-bird. She was happier than a pig in shit.

It was difficult not to burst her bubble, but I spared her a description of the role of Social Network Strategists; she didn’t need to know that her “hash-tags” would, in all probability, never fall like kisses to the eyes nor ears of her beloved Weekend-ers.

After all, I could never say for sure that this “feed” was not being spun from the honeyed fingers of these young heart-throbs; I could never peek around the edges of the iPad-curtain. I could never know with certainty that there wasn’t another Mind at work behind these musings; and I began tumbling down the slippery slope of solipsism.

Solipsism is the philosophical problem surrounding our knowledge of the existence of Other Minds; since I can never step outside of my own consciousness to objectively test whether another person’s consciousness is real, I can never know whether Others exist. I can only know that my own existence is real, and that I exist. You “Others” might simply be figments of my imagination, automatons or, worse, Social Networking Strategists trying to convince me that you are All Star Weekend.

The cruelty of online social networks, then, is the promise of closeness they bring. We can get closer than we have ever been to more people than we have ever known; we can feel we might be able to influence the people we idolize as profoundly as they have influenced us; but we can be less certain of their existence than if we were staring them in the face.

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posted by Rich Watts on Tuesday, 07 February 2012 @ 23:51

A tour de blunt-force noir.

*Flash Critic: micro-reviews in lyrical nutshells.*

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posted by Rich Watts on Friday, 27 January 2012 @ 12:00

Staring into the abyssal blankness of a new page is scary. It's a fear that copywriters must face daily to achieve their goals, and avoid the indignity of sleeping on park benches.

Fear is the Mind-killer

A solution comes from an unlikely source: Frank Herbert's science-fiction masterpiece, Dune (1965). If you haven't read it, you should.

The Bene Gesserit are key players in the political tussle for Dune's most valuable commodity, spice. Politically driven, this devious sisterhood have mastered the power of Voice to manipulate and control both themselves, and others. They are the queens of rhetoric; the Ogilvys of Dune.

These dastardly wordsmiths created the Litany Against Fear, and each time I read it, I'm awestruck by its wisdom:

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer;
The little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over, and through me,
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing;
Only I will remain."

(c) 1965 Frank Herbert

You Are All That's Left

The Litany Against Fear is useful because it reminds us that fear does not change us; once it passes we remain the same. And it provides a useful tip for writers: Writing is about you.

Every great story is autobiographical. It has to be because we can't think objectively; everything we experience is subjective. If you're not writing about yourself, then you're probably copying someone else.

The key to overcoming your fear of a blank page is remembering that everything starts with you. Whether you're writing a sales letter, blog post, or novel, it should be rooted in your own experience.

Break the curse

Begin by asking yourself:

"How could I be persuaded by a call to action?" Or "What am I looking to gain from this story?"

It's much easier to write for yourself, than to imagine an unfamiliar audience. Once you have broken the curse of the blank page, you can edit your work, and make it more attractive to your target audience.

People aren't all that different from each other; it's quite likely that your audience will be persuaded by the same concepts that persuaded you.

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posted by Rich Watts on Friday, 13 January 2012 @ 11:11

Twitter is an extremely powerful marketing tool for your company that can increase the number of visitors to your website. Increasing visitors means increasing ROI, but in order to capitalise from your popularity, it's crucial for people to find content that makes them want to keep coming back, and tell their networks about what they've found. In a word, your web-content must be useful.

I recently completed some copywriting for micro-volunteering site, Bright One; a place for non-profit organisations to request help from a global community of volunteers. A company called Learning for Life UK wanted help to increase their presence on Facebook, and Twitter - it got me thinking, so I've written this basic instructional blog post to inspire them. I hope it might also be useful to others trying to increase their web-presence.

So, where should you start?

Step One: Decide what constitutes useful content for your audience.

A quick brainstorming session would be a great start. Create profiles for your previous or current clients; or review completed briefs; this will help you identify the needs of your new clients.

In the case of Learning for Life UK, useful content could be course descriptions and timings; resources like guitar exercises; a newsletter about upcoming events; or some photos of people enjoying themselves at the classes.

The key to increasing your presence on social networks is encouraging your followers to share your content for you. Researcher, Dan Zarella suggests that your content must have authority and credibility for people to retweet it:

"Humans have a natural tendency toward imitation, especially of those who they assume have more or better information than themselves."

Step Two: Identify ways to deliver your content

The fastest way to get new content published online, is to create a blog. Since there are no hard-and-fast rules to blogging, you can churn out new content quickly. You don't need to worry too much about length, and you might even get away with a few typos (don't tell anyone I said that) since blogging is more informal (and cheaper) than print media.

I'm not condoning poor quality blogs, (mistakes will raise questions about your credibility as a source of information, and ultimately make your content less useful) I'm just illustrating that sometimes it's better to have regular, frequent updates than flawless prose.

Other media to consider:

Newsletters; email updates; Podcasts; Videos; Photos

Step Three: Create the content, and a strategy for regular updates.

Content that is regular and timely is more useful to visitors, and will get them sharing it. Outlining a basic content strategy will help keep your organised, and regular. Create a schedule for the next three months, and decided when new content will be created; what it might be; and which key events it will be connected to. It's also a good idea to delegate, and decide who's going to write it.

You might also consider drafting a "style guide" that you could issue to any guest writers in order to maintain a consistent voice throughout your content.

Zarella's research highlights the importance of timing to successful tweets, but the same rule applies to all new content. There are peaks times when the majority of people will be logged-in, and this is when your new content should "go live."

Zarella noticed that:

"there is a window of time during which sharing occurs more often. The first few days of the business week, Monday through Wednesday, typically see more ReTweeting than Thursday, Friday and the weekend.

Time of day also seems to be important; between 9am and 6pm the amount of ReTweets sees a sharp increase. So if you want your content to be ReTweeted it is advisable to post it during that window."

Step Four: Get Connected!

Once your content is in place, you'll have something useful to tweet about. Get a smart-phone, link it to your twitter account, and start using it as much as you can. Photos of events can make great tweets, and it's easy to take snaps with your phone and upload them instantly. You should also be on the lookout for interesting articles that are related to your business - if it's interesting to you, then it's probably interesting to your followers - copy the URL, and paste it into a tweet.

You're on your way to conquering social networks

Step Five: create plenty of opportunities to follow your organisation, and share content.

Giving your visitors a gentle reminder to follow, or like your business will increase your numbers, so make sure that every email, newsletter, or article provides them with the opportunity to do so. The easier you make it, the more people you'll convert. Create a simple phrase, and add it to your signature.

"Follow us @xyz for more info"

Conclusions:

A good tweet should be timely, interesting, and useful if it is going to encourage more people to join your merry dance. You're trying to capture the imagination of your audience, but also give them a sense of your/your businesses identity. Even the most mundane occurrences can start a conversation, and lead to a laugh. With a bit of practice, you'll figure out which tweets work, and which don't.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive "how to..." but I hope it inspires people who are new to twitter to get it working harder for their business. Please get in touch with @thewordspring if you'd like to share your comments about this article.

Thanks for reading.

Read Dan Zarella's original article here

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posted by Rich Watts on Wednesday, 04 January 2012 @ 11:37

Content marketing is the practice of delivering content to audiences who have chosen to receive it via subscription. This might be as simple as a newsletter, or as engaging as a podcast. So, how can charities tap into this powerful market, and how would it benefit the people they help?

During a particularly productive Christmas nap, I had a flash of inspiration. I have a keen interest in charity work, and enjoy my job as a copywriter, so naturally, my thoughts have turned to combining these two spheres of interest.

So came my idea: Distant Voices.

The idea centres on blogging, and RSS subscription. Instead of giving "just £2 a month" to the charity, patrons can opt-in to a paid subscription (perhaps more akin to a magazine pay-wall than RSS) to the blog of a particular project. The aim of the blog would be to give a voice to the people who are being affected by the project. They could produce updates, tell stories, share cultural experiences, and in the process improve their reading/writing skills.

My vision for distant voices is that it could provide an income for the authors of the blog, who are paid for their contributions as blogger for the site; but I also hope that it might give a voice to people who are seldom heard.

The "Arab Spring" of 2011 showed the power, and reach that micro-blogging site twitter has; perhaps Distant Voices could expand on this, and allow the people who live in poverty to become professional journalists.

Showing the impact of their various projects is vital to the marketing of a charity; people want to see how their money is being spent. Distant Voices could provide that feedback, but also put patrons in direct contact with the people they are helping.

Follow @thewordspring on twitter if you have any thought about the Distant Voices project.

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