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Writing is an essential marketing skill - pretty hard to be very effective without it - whether that’s actually writing the words yourself or being able to recognize a well written sales letter from a freelancer. Most every high school English teacher in the world will give you the same advice: if you want to be a good writer, you have to read a lot. Two of my favorite books on writing, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and On Writing by Stephan King offer this as a key.
Just about any reading will improve your writing, but reading advice and examples from master copywriters will really help your marketing writing. My friends Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg have assembled a tremendous cheat sheet for anyone who wants to head my advice.
Online Copywriting 101: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet Part 1 and Part 2 should take you well into the new year when it comes to consuming some great reading on the subject of writing.
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This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at Nov 19, 07 | 10:46 am and is filed under Copywriting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
You LIKE Bird by Bird?! Oh John, I thought better of you. It’s the worst focussed pile of nonsense maskerading as a how-to-write book I’ve ever read: if you don’t share Lamott’s brand of fluffy Christianity, the second half of the book is close to unreadable.
Sue, I guess you’ll just have to find other reasons to think better of me - this stuff is all relative though - I don’t recall coming across anything I would dub as Christianity in the book at all.
No one sees the world as it is we only see the world as we see it.
A quick war story: After some classical packaged goods and beverages training, I worked for a while as VP Marketing at Simon & Schuster books. EVeryone in my marketing department, of course, was only killing time until they could publish the Great American Novel. Consequently their business memos dragged on for what seemed like endless pages. I was declared a genius-for-a-day for teaching everyone how to get their business memos down to one page. One of them actually said, “Gee, I guess good business writing is about getting to the point and persuading your boss.” I’m not sure, but I think my response was, “Amen.”
Pop into nearly any college bookstore and peruse their English Composition shelves for some extremely useful titles. At my local community college, it is not necessary to be enrolled to purchase a book. Buy one on impulse to read while you wait for UPS to bring you the rest. (College bookstores tend to be over-priced … you might also want to DAGS for “used textbooks”)
You named two of my favorite books on writing here. and I really am NOT a fan of Stephen King’s fiction. Go figure.
Best,
Peggie