10 key tips for brilliant copy

Good copy’s not just about correct spelling, good grammar and getting the apostrophes in the right place. They’re just the prerequisite. Here’s a handful of tips to help you write good, effective copy.

Know your audience

Be clear in your own mind exactly who you are talking to, what you want to say to them and what action you want them to take. Imagine you’re actually speaking to someone and you’ll stand a good chance of sticking to the point.

Celeste AIDA or the beauty of planning

As a start you can do a lot worse than falling back on the old AIDA route: Attention Interest Desire Action. Kipling’s six honest serving men – what, why, when, how, where and who – are also a good way of checking that you’ve covered everything you wanted to.

Structure

If you’re writing long copy, break it up with headings, pullouts, bullets, pictures and captions – some people will read only the headings and captions. Sad but true, so use them well.

Edit, edit, edit

Get rid of everything that’s not relevant. Read what you’ve written out loud. Get someone else to read what you’ve written. Edit it again. It’s the old Blaise Pascale thing “If I’d have had more time, I’d have written less”. Only in French, obviously.

Be consistent

Don’t wander in and out of tenses, decide whether you’re “the company” or “we”, don’t refer to “the customer” and then “you”, and spell your product exactly the same way every time you write it. Inconsistency leads the reader into a vague sense of seasickness, which will work against you – unless, of course, you’re marketing seasick remedies.

Be ruthless

However great the phrase, if it doesn’t fit, bin it. You can waste hours keeping it safe on the pasteboard and trying to glue it into every sentence. Delete it and save yourself the heartache. If it was really that great you’ll think of it again.

Avoid jargon, clichés and hysteria

Unexplained acronyms, meaningless phrases, over-use of bold and italics, the placing of quote marks around perfectly normal words, and the hysterical use of exclamation marks will alienate your audience, and give you a strong chance of ending up in Private Eye’s Corporate Pseuds – and this is not a case of all publicity’s good publicity.

Don’t confuse your audience

If the audience has to stop to work out what you mean, you’ve lost them. So avoid: ambiguity (the words matched the banners because they were colourful); circumlocution (loath as I am to beat about the bush); unusual words (like circumlocution); double negatives (not unlikely success).

Be positive

Use the active voice (3 trillion people love us, not we’re loved by 3 trillion people). And be specific (we’ve increased people’s joie de vivre by 98%, not we’ve significantly increased people’s joie de vivre). Think of it like a firm handshake. Overdo it and you crush them. But be limp and all they want to do is go away and wash.

Love your writing

OK so it’s a bit touchy-feely, but if you don’t like what you’ve written, neither will your audience.