What is a Copywriter?

A lot of people ask me what exactly I do. Here’s an answer:

As a copywriter for an Integrated Communications company my main roles are writing, editing, and proofreading text, or copy, for print and multimedia (I’ve previously posted about editing and editing your own writing.) A copywriter’s job is to write clear, persuasive, original messaging, often with a limited word count. In marketing, copywriters are part of the Creative Department, and so I work closely with graphic designers, art directors, illustrators, other writers and a creative director to ensure a synthesis of visual and textual rhetoric in our materials. The Creative Department works closely with Account Services, the project, account and senior account managers who liaison with clients and vendors to initiate projects, handle client requests, relay information from to the Creative Department, and organize each project’s final production.

I divide my time writing for multiple projects throughout the course of a day, yet must ensure my copy matches each project’s style and tone. A copywriter isn’t simply told what to write by Account Services or clients; copywriting is a process of collaboration. I brainstorm concepts with members of the Creative and Account teams then, later, I’ll match my copy to the graphic designer’s visual layout and Account Service’s project description (a creative brief).

In copywriting, a first draft is never a final draft; it’s a process of revision.  There are both semantic and typographic restrictions that influence this revising process. For example, a client representative will suggest alternative wording or conceptual changes to a first draft; whereas a graphic designer may require copy to be shortened or lengthened depending on the layout. As a project progresses (from conceptual to design to production), its writer, designer, art director, account manager, and project manager sign a cover sheet to indicate a comprehensive review of the document. This is called “signing off”.

The goal of these early, internal revisions is to produce a draft that can be submitted to the client for their review. After this, the client will return the draft with another set of revisions. Client revisions can be challenging—often the subject of complaints that “they just don’t get it”. Good marketers don’t simply bend to their client’s will; we work closely with our clients to achieve a mutual vision. When this is achieved, we gain the marketing Holy Grail: client approval.

With client approval, a project can go into production (either print or digital), but first a final draft (a pre-flight) must be circulated internally to spot any errors. A pre-flight is then sent to the printer where a printer’s proof is made and returned for our approval—this is essentially a printer’s pre-flight. The copywriter’s task in this process is to proofread the pre-flight and, not long after, the printer’s proof. There’s a big difference between copyediting and proofreading: copyediting is revising the grammar, punctuation, word choice, tone, and coherence of the copy; proofreading is checking for visual or typographical anomalies, or easy to miss details like a copyright symbol or a “printed in Canada” footnote. The reason for this difference is that changes during the production stage of a project are time consuming and it’s expensive to change a printer’s proof.

Proofreading is an extremely important final step, and I’d like to share a relevant anecdote. At one point, I was the only writer at Punch. One of the Project Managers came to me to “sign off” on a calendar we were producing for our largest client—these calendars would go to over 30,000 of our client’s employees. As the copywriter, it was my responsibility to proofread and sign off on this final stage of the process—I had already written and revised the copy earlier that month.

“Did you have a chance to proofread the calendar?” She asked.

“Yes.” I replied.

“Did you have a chance to look at the printer’s proofs?” She asked.

“No. I looked at the pre-flights from yesterday and they were fine so I haven’t looked over the proofs.”

“Could you also take a look at the proofs please? This is a $17,000 print job and if there are any problems it would cost us a lot of money.”

It was then that I realized my signature was required before printing a $17,000 project. Not only that, but if there was a typo, grammatical error, or missing copyright symbol, my oversight would cost the company $17,000. The conversation ended with me heading over to comprehensively proofread this job as if my life depended on it. I’ve proofread every document that has crossed my desk just as thoroughly since, having realized the importance of copywriters in the marketing industry.

So there’s a little slice of my life for you. Any questions? Please leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: Copywriting,Stylistics,Marketing,Integrated Communications,What is a Copywriter?,Editing,Proofreading

 

Editing Tips and Tricks Part II: editing your own writing

What is Editing?

Does this seem like an obvious question? Of course the answer is simple, right? Editing is the process of taking a piece of writing and making it better . . . isn’t it? Although the word editing immediately conjures up words like grammar, spelling, and punctuation; here are a few other things that editing entails that might not immediately spring to mind:

• Perfecting a document’s tone and mood (for example, to make a document sound more professional, or less formal.)
• Formatting a document to fit a specified word length or typographic space.
• Ensuring a document is appropriate for a perceived audience.
• Verifying a document’s claims are true.

Audience and Purpose

As promised, this post is mainly about self-editing, but I’ve begun with the question “Why Edit?” because I think this is the first question with which every self-editor should start: “Why am I editing this document?” Along with that question come tangential questions like, “Who is my audience?” and “What is my purpose?”Once a reader has a clear sense of who they’re writing to and the reason they’re writing, they can establish a methodological approach for self-editing.

So, for example, I won’t edit this blog post as closely as I would edit a printer’s proof that will be sent out for a $70,000 job. If I make a spelling or grammar mistake in this blog post, likely a friend will remind to fix it, or a reader will make some type of quick judgment about my writing abilities. But if I miss an error on an expensive print job . . . well that could make me look really bad at work and, if repeated, could cost me my job. So when I edit a blog post, I know that I have a small audience and a fun purpose; whereas, when I proofread for my employer, I know that I have a large, complex audience (my employers and their clients) and a very serious purpose.

Self-editing

So once you’ve established your audience and your purpose, you’re ready to move on to self-editing. Here are a few tricks that I’ve come across in my experience as an editor that help. They likely won’t all work for you, but hopefully some do:

Create a Style Sheet or Use a Style Guide

There are plenty of excellent resources stylistic writing out there and having one close at hand is the quickest, most efficient, and most reliable way to answer those niggling questions like: “is it 7 or seven?,” “should I use a semi-colon?,” and “what’s the best way to write the date?” (In order: seven, to link two related independent clauses, and October 16, 2008.) But there’s no point in looking these points up if you’re not going to remember them, so that’s why you create your own Style Sheet. A Style Sheet can be a document on your computer, or a crinkled piece of paper on your desk—its main purpose is to be available as a ready reference when you can’t remember one of those little details that always slips your mind.

Leave some time between writing and editing

The great eighteenth century scholar, critic, lexicographer, and rhetorician Samuel Johnson once wrote that he put all of his writing in a desk drawer for seven years before he would even consider editing it. If he read it after seven years and felt that it was still worthy of publication, he would edit; if he didn’t like the piece, he tossed it away. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have the same deadlines as the great Dr. Johnson—after all, back in the eighteenth century, writers had patrons. However, it is a good idea to save time in between those two crucial early writing stages: the first draft and the first edit. A general rule is that the longer and more complex the document, the more time you should put it away in a desk drawer. This isn’t always possible, but, as I mentioned in my last post, when we write, we fill in logical “gaps” that others might not be able to fill in for themselves. Similarly, when you leave a piece of writing for a length of time, you lose the ability to fill in those gaps—which is a good thing because it allows you to read your own writing in the same way that your audience will.

Reading against the grain

Quite frankly, there’s not always time to leave a piece of writing before you publish it. But there are other strategies that can give you a different perspective on those logical gaps and allow you to fill them for your reader. Reading out loud is the best example of this. Reading out loud takes longer than reading silently, and therefore gives your brain more time to process the way you’re using language—again decreasing your brain’s ability to fill in gaps. Sorry for the pun here, but hearing the sound of your own writing allows you to realize when something doesn’t sound right.

Another strategy is reading your writing out of order. Try reading sentences or paragraphs in reverse order. This again displaces your brain from the logical flow of the document and allows greater time to consider portions of your document and focus on how language is used at the sentence level. If you don’t have a day to put away your writing, just read it out loud and out of order, you’ll notice mistakes immediately.

Know thyself

Ultimately, you’re the best judge of your own writing. And so, for example, you may already be aware that you have a penchant for flowery language, run-on sentences, ineffective jargon, or lapses in consistency. Keep these habits in mind when you’re editing—and write them down as reminders on your Style Sheet. This will allow you to focus on specific errors that you know will be present in your document.

 

Editing Tips and Tricks Part I: the challenge of editing

As you may or may not know, I am completing a Masters of Arts in Literary Studies at the University of Waterloo. But I’m also completing an 8-month co-op term as a copywriter, now copyeditor, at a marketing company. Anyone who has spent any time composing assignments for school knows that little typos and errors inevitably sneak through your self-editing abilities. Even if you’ve edited your assignment several times, misspelled words or subject-verb disagreements appear out of nowhere, causing you ask yourself, “how did I miss that?” But, what do you do if you’re getting paid to ensure that those mistakes don’t sneak through? Do you just read “harder”?

The reason that editing your own writing presents a unique challenge spawns from the same reason that we make grammar mistakes in the first place. When you’re writing, you make assumptions about the meaning of your content internally, but your reader can’t make those same assumptions–they don’t have the background knowledge of the subject that you do. So, for example, you might write, “Steven Harper agreed to spend two extra hours debating the economy, but it wasn’t necessary.” But what wasn’t necessary—the extra time debating the economy, or the debate itself? As a writer, you know that you meant that the extra time wasn’t necessary, but your reader might not. It’s difficult to realize, but you should have written, “it wasn’t necessary for Steven Harper to spend two extra hours debating the economy.”

Anyway, without getting too technical, the main reason that editing your own writing is difficult is that humans use language in context–this means that a conversation or a document each has meaning within a specific setting. Conversations occur based on our surrounding; documents are composed based on textual needs. So imagine that you and your friend are in a restaurant debating about Stephen Harper’s perceived need for a debate on the economy. If your friend Cheryl sits with you unexpectedly, she’ll have no idea of the context of your argument—though it’s likely won’t take her long to catch on. But you and your friend will give her a brief update on the conversation because she doesn’t know its context.

In order to effectively write, one has to empathize with an audience—the same way that you’ve updated your friend Cheryl. The difference between conversation and writing is that with writing we’re not always 100% sure of the ongoing conversation–it’s taking place inside of our heads. The human mind is so complex that it can think of thousands of aspects of a thing at a given moment, and all of those ideas want to come bursting out when we discuss or write about a topic. but a writer has to choose the best ideas and communicate them in the clearest way. Yet, when writing, we make assumptions about our topic that are very clear in our own minds, but that our readers may not understand—such as the fact that Stephen Harper’s extra time debating was unnecessary, and not that the debate itself was unnecessary. Either way, we inevitably make these assumptions when we write, and the trick with self-editing is spotting these assumptions and fixing them for your audience.

One of my responsibilities as the copyeditor is proofreading every document before it goes to print. Proofreading sounds  easy, but you have to keep in mind that I’ve often written these documents’ first drafts, edited these drafts according to internal revisions, read them again upon the completion of internal revisions, read them again in layout, edited them again according to client revisions, read them upon the completion of client revisions, read them again in layout, and then read them again in preflight (a term used in printing to describe confirming that the digital files required for printing are all present, valid, correctly formatted, and edited.) What I’m trying to say is that I’ve often read documents that I’ve written 5-6 times before the final stage of editing, but then I have to proofread them one last time before they go to print— “proofing.”

But, if a typo has somehow appeared in a document at the proofing stage, you’re in danger of missing typos because you’ve read the document so many time you’ve almost memorized. And this is just like a student with an assignment–you read it over and over until you’re sure it’s perfect, but those typos still appear. Well one or two typos isn’t a big deal for a student, but for me it could cost my company thousands of dollars. And, realistically, in the “real world” typos in documents like business proposals, posters, brochures, even emails can cause the audience to rethink the reliability of the document’s source–i.e., you! The next post in this series will outline some tips and tricks for editing your own work.

 

CreatAthon: the fallout

Check it out: I got some press from press release I sent to the University of Waterloo! I guess the general press release that I wrote wasn’t too bad after all—it generated articles in the Exchange Morning Post and the Waterloo Record. I really learned a lot about PR and event organizing last week.

Fortunately, the CreateAthon went off without a hitch. We provided our 11 clients with new materials that they’re really going to enjoy. I had some great help from our freelancer, Greg, our Sales Manager’s husband, Steve, and our other copywriter, Lindsay, returned from maternity leave to stop by and help. Greg came to help for one hour but stayed for four—he wrote the new website for the KW Seniors Day Program. Steve wrote two brochures for us, Lindsay wrote one brochure, and I wrote five posters (two for the Waterloo Region Block Parent Program and three for the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Working Against Youth Violence Everywhere (WAYVE) program), two brochures (one for the Eating Disorder Awareness Coalition of Waterloo Region and one for the Special Olympics of Kitchener Waterloo), two funding request letters (both for the Block Parent Program), a radio script (for the Christian Family Counselling Centre), and I edited everything else. Good times! (Seriously!) 

Anyway, it was a very worthy event but I was simply shattered afterwards. I think the entire creative team really hit the wall around 6am, but I was impressed with our Art Directors and our Creative Directors ability to discuss the materials with clients at the 7:30am official unveiling. Personally, I was too tired to speak with clients at that point . . . plus, the way I figured it, who would want to talk to the writer anyway?

Some important professional lessons I learned while being responsible for the writing of 11 projects in 24 hours.

1. Make sure everyone is on the same page. When the deadline is a tight one like this, it’s imperative that everyone constantly communicates the status of their work to Project Managers.

2. Don’t take criticism personally. If the clock is ticking on a tight deadline like this, people are bound to get stressed out and say things that they might not normally say. Keep the context of the situation (i.e., high stress) at the top of your mind and show some empathy for the other person’s position.

3. Save yourself for the official unveiling. My biggest regret from the CreateAthon was not speaking with the clients more about the materials I helped generate for them. I was tired, grumpy, and I felt gross. Hindsight is 20/20 but if I ever have the opportunity to do something like this again, I am going to ensure that I speak with the clients about the work I’ve done for them.

4. Drink lots of coffee and eat. Thanks to Tim Horton’s for generously sponsoring our event—the coffee was really the glue that brought the whole project together . . . Okay that might be overdramatic but it really did help. Actually, we had some awesome team members who donated the entire evening to baking lasagna for dinner and lots of cookies and snacks, so those were just as important as the coffee.

5. Thank the people you worked with. I made a point of personally thanking my colleagues who motivated me, worked with me, fed me, and put up with me for those 24 hours. There is nothing more validating than some genuine thanks.

Well that’s enough for now *yawn*. I need some more sleep.