Copywriting Workshop Hoorah...

There are some of us who feel that copywriting isn’t getting the attention it deserves on our course. However credit must go to the tutors who arranged for Roger Horberry to come in and pass on his copywriting wisdom. Author of “Brilliant Copywriting”, Roger has tons of experience in copywriting, mainly for branding and design.

Words are incredibly powerful, after all that’s how we all communicate. You don’t see people drawing pictures to each other on the street do you?! (Incase you hadn’t realised, I’m a copywriter).

We started the day off focusing on tone of voice. We had to re-write an advert but in the voice of someone famous. I got Danni Minogue. Needless to say, the result was quite entertaining. The exercise taught us the importance of giving our writing a voice. An identifiable tone of voice in the writing of some brands is arguably as important as their logo.

Roger then asked us to take a famous speech and ruin it. How do you do that, I hear you ask. Well a good speech has a message to communicate. You could write that message in one line – not very inspiring. The magic comes in all the small details, the language, the pauses, the delivery, the rhythm of the writing. So we took famous speeches and took all those parts out, which left us with flat, boring bullet points.

Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches…” speech becomes:

1) We’ll fight everywhere.
2) If worst comes to worst and we starve here, we’ll keep fighting anyway.

We carried out lots of different exercises throughout the day, each with its own little lesson in copywriting. My favourite by far was writing 6 word stories. You may think that’s impossible, a whole story in just 6 words, yet legendary author Ernest Hemingway wrote “For Sale. Baby’s Shoes. Never Worn.” Still think it’s impossible? The emotion captured in those 6 words is just extraordinary. We were told to write 6 words that our 30-year-old self would tell our 20-year-old self. I wrote, “Buy a nice hat. You’ll bald”. Not as amazing as Hemingway's but funny nonetheless, well Roger thought so anyway (he’s bald).

Overall it was a really good day where we could concentrate on words for a change. A big thanks to Roger for coming to Lincoln and letting us play with language.