Copywriting Blog
The Captain Kidd Pirate Ship Experience – recreating 17th century sailing ships in 21st century London
Are you interested in British maritime history? How about traditional crafts and skills? Do you like the idea of helping to crew a replica square rigged wooden sailing ship on the Thames in London – or maybe on an Atlantic …
Copywriting for eBay
Recently we’ve been selling a few things on eBay, nearly all inherited from or given to me over the years by my dear old late Dad, an antiquarian book dealer and avid auction goer who bought lots, sold little and …
Clever copywriting – where does wordplay fit in?
As a follow-on from my previous post, ‘Should advertising be clever’, this entry is about wordplay. Perhaps the commonest form of wordplay is the pun. When I started out as an advertising copywriter, one of the first lessons I was …
Is your copywriting bent?
As a follow-up to my earlier entry about whether copywriting should be clever, this post takes a closer look at what makes a clever ad, what makes a dull one, and what makes a largely incomprehensible one. The best print …
British and American English – it seems we’re also divided by unspoken language
Most people know the phrase about America and Britain being divided by a common language, whether it was originally coined by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde or our old friend Anonymous. It suddenly struck me recently when I was watching a …
Is it worth writing a novel?
As a copywriter, I’m sometimes asked if I’m only doing it to make a bit of money while I write My Great Novel. All copywriters have a novel in them, don’t they? Well, the likes of Fay Wheldon, Dorothy L …
When to use contractions in your writing (and when you mustn’t or shouldn’t’ve)
There’s a lot of confusion about when to use contractions in copywriting and when not. First of all, what is a contraction? It’s where a word has one or more letters missing, replaced by an inverted comma. “Isn’t” instead of “Is not” …
Thank you letters for spam emails
I was always brought up to be polite and it was regularly drummed into me as a child that if someone writes to you, you must write back. Especially if their communication included a postal order, book token or …
