If so, now’s the time to act. We’re looking for three new copywriters to join our fast-growing copywriting agency in Colchester, Essex.

Can you see yourself as…

• A versatile copywriter with the ability or potential to write sharp copy that helps businesses to sell? If you’ve got an interest in marketing, then even better – we want you to help market our services to major clients.

Or…

• One of two new fashion copywriters? These are entry-level posts that will give you a valuable first foothold in the copywriting industry. You’ll mostly be writing online descriptions for a major online fashion retailer, but we’ll also train you to write great copy for a range of other formats and clients.

We’re offering a salary in the region of £18-£20,000 for the single copywriter post, and one of £16-£18,000 for the fashion copywriter positions.

We’re a young company, though, and we’re having a lot of fun as we grow – so if you’re really good at the job, there’ll be opportunities for rapid promotion.

To apply, simply follow the instructions in these job descriptions:

» Copywriter job description

» Fashion copywriter job description

But hurry – the closing date for applications is 9th August 2010, with interviews shortly afterwards. So don’t leave your application until the last minute, or you may miss out…

I’ve worked in both the public relations and marketing industries, and it’s made me wonder which of the creative industries produces the best stuff.

These are the conclusions I’ve come to. Get ready to disagree violently…

Marketers. Marketers promote and sell, but I’ve noticed that more and more of them are relying heavily on graphic design, forcing good copywriting to take a back seat. It might make for campaigns with ‘big art’, but if the copy misses the point it simply won’t do its job properly – selling.

Advertisers. Advertisers and marketers are in the same boat. Big budgets, CGI and well-placed explosions can make people sit up and watch, but when it’s all over I sometimes wonder what I just watched was actually advertising.

You’d think that with the amount spent on television advertising, everyone would have cottoned to the fact that conveying details about what you’re advertising (and why it benefits the customer) will sell your products – and much more effectively than pixies dancing on a car as it floats through the air.

PR Gurus. These days, public relations experts are often seen as spin doctors – but their job demands a lot more than spinning a good tale and covering up others’ errors and mishaps. They must retain their ability to communicate in a written form with ordinary people – as well as with the journalists who they hope will run with their stories.

If a PR professional can’t communicate the who, what, why, when, where and how in the first two lines of a press release (and that’s being generous), they simply haven’t done their job well enough.

Journalists. Most journalists’ work is produced to inhuman deadlines, but there’s little to beat breaking a news story – especially when the writer sinks their teeth with relish into a juicy revelation.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God, the British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to! (Humbert Wolfe)

Journalists usually communicate well and, if sub-editors are to be believed, one or two can write rather nicely – sometimes unaided.

Copywriters. Copywriters have to work with all the characters listed above. Some have different specialisms, but one thing unites all the good ones – their writing is designed to sell.

Copywriting that sells is written in deceptively simple language – so simple that most people assume they can write it themselves. Once in a while that’s true, but so is this: good copywriting is never produced by committees. Find a copywriter whose work you like, and stick with them at all costs.

So, who writes the best copy?
It depends what you want the writing to achieve. But next time you read a newsletter, advert, magazine, flyer or brochure that appeals to you, ask yourself who wrote it.

Whoever it was, they’ll know two basic things – how to grab your attention, and how to talk simply and directly about benefits that are of interest to you. Those skills are an asset to any profession.

Rebecca Wheeler

She is currently working in a freelance capacity on public relations and copywriting projects. Rebecca also writes her own blog reflecting on all things marketing, PR, social media and technology-related at www.marketing-and-pr.co.uk.

There’s lots of good stuff in it, including…

• Main article: How you can use good copywriting to get paid quicker.
• Find out how The Copywriting Agency was set up to help small and medium sized businesses make more profit.
• Has your website been built by cowboys? The 30-second test that reveals all.
• A monstrous email howler. Mind your grammar or you’ll lose sales.
• The Style Guide of Extreme Prejudice. Are you putting off customers with these mistakes?
• News roundup. What the team at our copywriting agency has been up to…

You can read the first issue online – and if you like it, you can make sure you don’t miss another by subscribing on this page.

Happy reading!

In the meantime, if you belong to a small or medium sized business, you will want to know about our new venture for SMEs – The Copywriting Agency. The new website is a great place to find out how our services can help you to sell both online and off, so go and take a look.

Back here at Ben Locker & Associates, we’re also about to issue our first newsletter (‘about time’, you might say!). It’s a light read, and it will raise a smile or two as well as give you ideas for making your business – so sign up today if you haven’t already.

Why would I be doing this when I had a perfectly good, brand-new notebook already? I wanted to see if they had a version of the same notebook with Irish ruled lines (for the uninitiated, Irish rules are just narrower).

The ‘right’ stationery

Minutiae like these drive people who believe that – to do their best work – they need to have the ‘right’ collection of stationery.

And not just that. The stationery has to be arranged on their desk and in various draws ‘just so’ (compulsive neatness usually goes hand in hand).

To such people, achieving this lofty goal means they will be able to turn lead into gold, or write the great 21st century novel, or finally produce the blindingly fantastic writing that currently lies just just beyond their grasp, awaiting the day when the right pen is held over the right notebook.

Legendary notebooks for ordinary people

This is one of the reasons why Moleskine has proliferated. Moleskine markets itself as the ‘legendary’ notebook that was used by artistic luminaries such as Hemingway and Picasso.

But what are their marketers actually doing? They’re playing on the subtle idea that, somehow, anyone can scale the creative heights of the greats by recreating similar surroundings or circumstances – which might, just might, have imbued their work with that little something extra.

This is, of course, untrue; but like the relics of saints, there is a certain mystique that draws people towards the idea of owning something of the same kind as someone great.

So do I have a stationery fetish? Well, I have a slightly excessive appreciation of good stationery, but the fact is that one of my best pieces of writing was scrawled on the inside of a cigarette packet I found on the floor of a Nottingham club.

Vitriolic copy

It was a short, vitriolic social critique, and I still have it – thoroughly disinfected, though.

Ultimately, any form of creative angst can lead to superstition. What we must not forget is that the answer doesn’t lie outside ourselves, and certainly not in a fresh packet of Field Notes or a cellophane-wrapped Moleskine.

Copywriting’s not excluded. When you use words to connect buyers with the answer to their problems, it’s human insight – not handmade paper – that’s behind the art.

So, I’m not going to order an Irish-ruled notebook from overseas.  Besides, I’ve already got two precisely positioned on my desk at home…

You know the kind of job. You obliterate every superfluous word until you achieve total clarity.

Net result, prose so simple that everyone assumes they could have written it themselves.

It opened Johan’s eyes. “It’s almost as though I’m not fulfilling my role,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, before I started work as a copywriter, I assumed that the writing would need to display more ingenuity. But the greatest ingenuity lies in the simplicity of getting the message across with no apparent effort.”

So true. The only problem is getting your clients to see it the same way. How do you get someone to pay for something they think they can do themselves?

The answer, of course is to let them do just that. Do you agree?

Johan’s from Cape Town, South Africa. After overindulging in English literature as a boy, he got it into his head to study in England and quickly rattled through a BA in Viking Studies and an MA in History at the University of Nottingham.

So, if you need to commission any chronicles, death warrants, theological treatises or brochures for Viking longboats, then we’re the copywriting agency for you.

Johan’s aptitude for the English language, his keen eye for detail, and a mind that’s rather too full of dreadful Victorian poetry, give him a natural suitability to be a Junior Copywriter. So he’s now with us, pen in hand, working his magic on business websites and corporate literature.

“It’s great to be here,” said Johan, “and I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into some copywriting. I’m most keen to exercise my hand at moulding language, and turning it to create such forms that will, in their turn, dazzle and dare the mind, and lead down paths that will, well…” [I think you mean ‘write clear copy that make sales for clients’ - Ed.]

After the above paragraph was edited down from its original 4,000-word essay format, Johan continued: “While here, I hope to learn as much as I can about the copywriting industry, and the businesses this agency serves. I also hope that my presence will help the business grow, and that I can play a role in taking it to new heights.”

Johan was also very grateful to have finally made it to Essex, particularly after being delayed for 10 days by a cloud of volcanic ash that seemed – at times – to be the first salvo of Armageddon. Tossed from pillar to post by obscure airlines, he spent four days in a Johannesburg hotel while being told conflicting stories.

Looking back at the experience, Johan said: “I thought I was just getting on a flight. Instead I spent days losing my grip on reality and obsessing about our place in the cosmic latticework. I’ve got over it now, and have come away with insight into the monumental incompetence of airlines, poor communication, ripe misinformation, plus the effects of exploding volcanoes. I can live with the volcanoes, but it’s a bit much having to pay for the other three.

We just very pleased to have him here and hope you’ll get a chance to meet and work with him soon.

Follow Johan on Twitter: @johanvdMuk

From here.

Still, it’s not as embarrassing as David Beckham’s misspelled tattoo.

Any other sporting spelling howlers that spring to mind?

In a nutshell, Michigan’s Grand Rapids Public School Superintendent Bernard Taylor has stirred up controversy – by criticising pupils’ poor spelling and grammar.

The pupils, from Colt Creative Arts Academy, had written to Taylor asking him not to cut art and music programmes. So he turned up at the school, told the pupils their wish had been granted – and then reprimanded them for the bad spelling and grammar in their letters.

Some parents were not amused. One, Angel Gonzalez, huffed:

“I don’t know that guy.  He may be a great guy.  I just don’t know him personally.  I know nothing about him.  I don’t want him barging into my kids’ classroom making them feel belittled.  Even if that’s not what he intended on doing, that’s what he did.”

Okay, this is the USA and not Britain. And it’s perfectly possible to go off at a tangent, and suggest that political ideology is responsible for scrubbing the concept of failure from school education.

Write well – but not too well. That would be dangerous

For me, though, there’s an even more depressing side to the story – the idea that both reading and writing have been reduced to necessary, but ultimately functional skills. Chores, if you prefer.

These days, the school system seems to say “Learn to read, yes. Be literate enough to understand your council tax bill, but not so well that you read for pleasure or for thought. That would be dangerous”

It’s the same with writing. “Learn to write, yes. Be competent enough to let someone know you want something, but not so good that you can use the written word to put forward arguments, convince people of benefits, demolish the cant and hypocrisy of others. That would be more dangerous still”

About 10 years ago, I used to help schools set up reading clubs for Year 7 pupils. Even by then, the so-called Literacy Strategy was forcing children to focus solely on the function of reading – the skill of doing it, not the things you could actually do and learn (and become) as a reader. It had become something necessary but dull, that reduced great writing to the status of ‘texts’, issued for children to pick at with the wrong end of a educational sawbones’s scalpel.

Take pleasure in something, and it’ll lead to thought

What our clubs did was to put pleasure and possibility back into reading, and to inspire ideas, enthusiasm and healthy disagreement. They were simple, and they worked – and they got kids reading and talking in spite of what the curriculum dictated.

These days, I think we may be making the same mistakes about writing. Let’s get back to that parent. If you’re anything like me, you wouldn’t whinge to a reporter if you thought a public official had belittled your child. You’d do something much more powerful…

…you’d write him a letter.

And one to his boss. And maybe one to the newspaper. And if your argument was good, that official would have to back down.

After all, if we lose the ability to say what we mean in writing, how can we expect our children to learn to do the same?

Then look at the back label. This one…

“Selected aromatic malts give the beer it’s deep golden colour and full-bodied fruity, lightly spiced taste.”

Oh dear. These guys need a copywriter…

If it’s any help, my grandmother was half Belgian.

Op uw gezondheid.