Soothing Critics

Considering that I am a student currently in Integrated Marketing Communications, this blog has lacked, so I have been told, anything to truly do with marketing.  I suppose I'll at least touch on marketing with this one then, just to try and soothe some critics.

Copywriting is vital in marketing; it is a skill that everyone needs to possess in the marketing world of today.  The problem is that many people don’t enjoy writing in any form, finding it laborious to write anything longer than a blog that is supposed to be three-hundred words in length—whoops—and often do I hear them complain that writing a report of two-thousand five-hundred words was nearly impossible.  We had weeks to complete the task that, while unenviable and relatively boring, actually covered quite a bit of useful information.   

Allow me to illustrate how very easy this task should have been.  Those 2,500 words equal out to about five pages of writing…this task gave us weeks to read a book that was two-hundred and eighty-one pages in length and then write five pages about it.  All that was required was for us to sit down and read the book at forty-six pages a day, taking short notes of vitally important revelations.  Once the book was completed, we then needed to only sit ourselves in front of a computer—I know, who has the time to be in front of a computer these days?—and write one page per day.  I doubt anybody actually did this.

Now, in terms of copywriting, those same people who complained bitterly are going to be faced with having to write a whole lot more in the future.  Will they be looking into becoming lead copywriters?  I seriously doubt it, but will there come a time when they need to be capable of writing intelligent pieces of written work?  Undoubtedly.  People can complain about the amount of time that it takes them to write, but would it not be easier to just withhold complaints until after they complete the work?  When somebody spends over five hours writing 2,500 words, I have to wonder how much of that is spent moaning to their friends over social media sites, taking various phone calls and just sitting back and staring at the ceiling.  Writing is difficult, that’s a fact many people have to face, but light planning of the points that your paper will revolve around before letting that brilliant piece of hardware in your body called a brain take control will certainly help.

Conveying Tone

One of the biggest difficulties that I have found with nearly any form of writing, including copywriting in marketing, is to properly convey tone.  By just altering a few short words it is possible to completely alter the reader’s inner voice, so that instead of making a beauty product sound as though it can used for light touch-ups, it seems like it needs to be caked on.  Which, considering some of the women who walk by me day by day, this advice might be taken quite literally.  Sarcasm seems to be the main problem for my writings, and has been mentioned to me repeatedly that some of what I write is quite rude because of this, and I have to admit that after reviewing some of the written work, there is a lot of sarcasm. 

I understand that professors might want their students to look at products objectively, to write a short report on why a topic is amazing or why it falls flat.  Although I cannot remember when last a teacher told me that it was alright for me to bash the reading.  I have to say that, just because one person thought that a book was amazing and world-defining, does not mean that another will.  Our likes and our dislikes are our own; I don’t need a professor to tell me that a blog written by a particular marketer is simply amazing.  Under my own volition I actually went to a certain blog to see if I could understand the near obsession that professors have with it.  I was more than disappointed, to say the least.  As I refuse to ‘name names’ as it were, I will content myself by simply saying that this particular blogger lacked everything I had been told they possessed.  Their written work was sub-par; their ideas hardly more than a baby bird struggling to attain altitude. 

While yes, my own work could certainly benefit from proof-reading to help eliminate various errors that forever creep into any lengthy works of writing, that does not excuse someone who is reputed to have nearly impeccable grammar and spelling.  Perhaps it is just a pet peeve of mine to think that words should not simply be created from thin air because someone with the mind of a gold-fish decides that they cannot find a word that properly describes what they are feeling and so invent a new one.  It’s called a dictionary; your computer even has one installed in case you have too much difficulty brushing the dust off the one on your bookshelf.

Sarcasm, for me at least, is something that I often try and put into my writing because without it, I feel as though the readers will miss out on how deeply I dislike something.  Could I write without it?  Certainly, but that would be akin to being told that you are no longer allowed to speak with any inflections.  A dry tone in writing is death, and I would prefer to be known as ‘that guy who uses sarcasm’ than ‘that guy who writes such boring nonsense in a tone that grates on your very nerves’.