Kirsten Irving, Creative Copywriter & Proofreader

My name's Kirsten and I'm a freelance copywriter and proofreader based in London. I work with startups, charities and global brands to tell your story memorably, and develop the tone of voice that really speaks for you. Need a quote or have a question? Great. Let's have words. [email protected] 07974666772

[kirstenirving]

Alchemy: Why poetry publishers need to get it together

Poetry publishing can be tough, isolating and With that in mind, I’ve written this short piece for the wonderful BookMachine about the need for poetry presses to collaborate.

It contains such gems as:

“Collaboration is about more than just scoring retweets, high-fives and affiliate sales. It’s about access to new countries and languages, new spaces, new voices, new ways of looking at poetry.“

So there!

[irvingwords]

Lost, not profound - the tyranny of the motivational quote

We all know people who post motivational quotes. They’re usually lovely people who genuinely wish others well, but they sure post a lot of inspirational stuff.

In 2015, a study linked such posts to low intelligence scores, in addition to discreet unfriendings. I’m not convinced by the correlation between IQ and sharing pictures of sunsets and silhouetted climbers captioned “See people not for who they are, but who they can become.” But I am interested in why, certainly for me, such motivational posters do not just fail to motivate but actively dispirit and sadden me. Why I and others feel wearied by them, and why low moods are not soothed but exacerbated by their messages.

After all, it’s just a lovely picture and a kindly-meant sentiment. What could be depressing about that?

1. Pressure to be happy and optimistic. When I was little I loved My Little Pony (bear with me). But the MLP movie had some seriously unhealthy messages for children regarding happiness. The main enemy was a purple flood called The Smooze, cooked up by cackling witches sick of the ponies’ happy smiling faces. The Smooze made anyone it touched gloomy and grumpy - a normal pre-teen, in other words. When one of the baby ponies was Smoozed, she was greeted with horror and treated like damaged goods until restored to the default Pony state of delirious sunniness. Honest, it took until Inside Out for a kids’ movie to right this wrong.

Similarly, motivational posters are cloaked orders enforcing a norm of smiley happy joy joy: get on with it; be positive; stop worrying; believe in yourself; stop crying because this person climbed a mountain etc. On the face of it, all good messages to receive. But if you’re really low, or having a rough time for whatever reason, they’re the social media equivalent of rubbing ginger in your eyes. Nothing guaranteed to make you feel more broken and alienated than a message telling you that this injured dog making friends with a wingless duckling has it together than you so pull yourself together.

2. A vague sense of despair that other people find comfort in platitudes. You know these people. You like them. And yet you feel like the emperor is standing there before the lot of you, shaking his stark naked behind while everyone comments on the trim of his cloak.

I mean, say you’ve missed your train, your kid’s thrown up on you and someone just shoved you into a railing in their commuting rush. How, then, in Niflheim, does this hunk of stale cheese help?

No respect to the bird. I love birds. Some of my best friends are birds.

Seeing 25 Likes on a post like this only serves to remind you that you’re the only person in the world for whom some bus passenger’s tinnily blaring headphones aren’t just Nature’s way of telling us to dance more.

3. The queasy discomfort of disability porn. Using people with disabilities to illustrate a quote about trying hard by a non-disabled person as if being disabled is something that can be overcome with faith, trust and pixie dust. Instead of, y’know, less social stigma and better accessibility options.

4. Ditto other marginalised groups.

5. The basic feeling of being talked down to. I mean, it’s always a winner. Bonus points for gendering that message.

If the flood of motivational quotes and posters is actively wearing you down, but you don’t want to mute, block or unfriend the friend in question, I recommend the following three-step plan:

1) Cleanse your palate by googling a topic of your choice and ‘demotivational’ for some top visual snark.

2) Install the plugin Rather on your browser and replace a kill list of “inspirational” “beautiful”, “so true” etc. with picture of robots, pandas, Shakira - anything you like. Hit refresh and whenever a friend gushes over a poster, up will pop R2D2, Po or that mud-wrestling bit out of the ‘Whenever, Wherever” video. Originally built to replace babies with bacon, Rather is rather good.

3) Channel your inner Bianca del Rio. Get trolling with your own subversive posters and break the cycle, once and for all.

[irvingwords]

“That’s not what I meant!” Getting email tone on-key

Email etiquette guides seem to agree on one thing: when writing an email, best practice is to match the voice and follow the style of the original email received.

Sound advice, and something that comes fairly naturally to a copywriter. With increasingly conversational trends, we’re used to matching corporate copy to a reader’s tone of voice. But it’s not always straightforward, especially if you’re making the first move. So is email doomed to veer between overstiff formality and exclamation-laden block caps as we struggle to pitch it right, or are we all getting a feel for a flexible sense of email tone?

Flexible, that is, in the sense that while the right tone depends on cultural context, relationship between correspondents, age, language and industry, among countless other factors, we have a rough agreement on a version of formality for email that is uniformly more relaxed than the paper equivalent in each case.

J. Willis Westlake, in his instructional 1876 book How To Write Letters, declared:

A neat well-worded letter of one page once a month is better than a slovenly scrawl of four pages once a week. In fact, bad letters are like store bills: the fewer and the shorter they are, the better pleased is the recipient.

Sadly, most of us don’t have the luxury of waiting until the muse strikes to respond to emails. The speedy turnaround (and expectation of reciprocal speed) of correspondence is the reason for the toned-down formality of email as a whole. It’s also behind the popularity of emoji, which help to avoid ambiguity, convey humour and speak that thousand words in one symbol.

It’s particularly important to avoid ambiguity, say, when approaching a new client or employer, or anyone in a professional context with whom you are not familiar. But emoji have not yet become normalised in business messages, at least not in the early stages of correspondence. Overuse, or sometimes any use, can come across as overly familiar, try-hard or immature. So how do we make sure our words aren’t misbehaving in translation?

Some sites seem to think they’ve got the maths down, and have gone so far as to develop tone-checking software to “prevent you from accidentally saying something that you might regret”. While this might seem to some like the robots taking over at last, for people with difficulties in interpreting emotion, say, it might well save unnecessary hostility and frustration.

But the short answer is: we can’t guarantee our words won’t be misread, any more than we could when our messages went by snail mail alone. What we can do is re-read important emails, or better yet, get another human to read them, to identify and zap troublesome phrasing, accidental ambiguities and the plain old incomprehensible claptrap that comes to us all in the dead of night.

With that in mind, I urge compassion in correspondence. It’s important to take a moment out when reading genuine emails from individuals that set off your ‘off-email-register’ alarm. If the tone seems overly formal or informal, ask yourself whether they’re communicating in a second or third language, or from a different cultural background. Are they nervous or unsure of your status relationship? Or could there be something else at play to which you are not privy? If they’re plain rude or offensive, that’s one thing, but awkwardness deserves a little leeway. 

We’re still in the process of getting tone right in emails. It’s a work in progress, but learning to listen, apply context and really read what someone’s written can help us along the way.

[irvingwords]

Chocolate Bot – Markov Chocolates and deliciously bad copy

When you browse the menu in a box of luxury chocolates, does the opulent copy make you drool or roll your eyes? One witty programmer is in the second camp, and he’s come up with a sweet form of satire.

I first encountered technologist and designer Tom Armitage when I interviewed him for Maker World magazine. The focus of the article was The Literary Operator, a cross-genre collaboration with sci-fi author Jeff Noon. Armitage created and programmed the Operator, a fantastic device that can scan a book in a moment and print a micro-remix of its contents. Taking inspiration from metatexts throughout history, the experiment was irreverent, sharp and audience-addicting. In addition to his literary operations, however, Tom has also been masquerading as the founder of fictional confectionary empire, Markov Chocolates. Sound classy, doesn't it? A spot of Moscow mystique. They're probably served in gold-wrapped pyramids to silk-clad dignitaries by an ever-indulgent ambassador. Following them on Twitter treats the reader to mouthwatering, if completely over-the-top, descriptions of their wares. There's just one catch: they're not real. The company aren't real, (brace yourself) the chocolates aren't real and since imaginary companies don't employ staff, there's no earnest marketing bard coming up with those florid tweets. So what's the explanation behind the ghost in the machine? Obviously, it’s a bot. But this is a splendidly cheeky bot. @MarkovChocolate is a Twitter account inspired by sickly-sweet chocolate box copywriting, and run using Markov Chains. For those, like me, for whom maths is a GCSE-shaped memory, these are mathematical systems, used to model everything from games of chance to Google's PageRank mechanism. Each chain is a memoryless process, i.e. it remembers only the last thing it created, and bases its next creation on that. So each flight of fondant fancy uses the information from its last tweet, in combination with its overall pool of gooey phrasing, to create the next micro-message. The resulting descriptions are brilliantly odd and tongue-in-cheek, yet still strangely plausible. There's a warning in this for copywriters. Lay off the liqueurs when composing for chocolate boxes, or you might find your florid phrasing immortalised in a Markov remix. Something a little like this, perhaps: 

Can human copywriters keep up with this deluge of decadence? I say go big or go home. Dollop on the saccharine and dial down the moderation for an excellent exercise in style.

Image credits: (i) Box of chocs courtesy of Petr Kratochvil, via publicdomainpictures.net (ii) Twitter screencapped by author.

An earlier version of this article was originally posted on copythatcopy.com

[irvingwords]

Bad ad poetry? Hire poets!

Living in London, we’re surrounded by TFL’s abominable Travel Better London posters, with their godawful doggerel. 

First, you spot one and sigh gently to yourself. 

Then you notice another. And another. Ye gods, they’re all over the place, much like their scansion. 

Then a chill runs down your spine, as you wonder if everyone else secretly thinks the poetry is good. 

That’s when things get a little Mugatu.

God bless Crap Verse in Ads for speaking truth to advertising and salving the rage by archiving these examples of crimes against art. I believe CVIA’s flagging of these ads is one of the main forces behind TFL’s decision to hold a competition to improve the poetry on their posters.

Not that it helped a bit. The results were just as bad, if not worse than the originals. Sigh again.

“Why didn’t you enter?” I hear you ask, “if you loathe the winning poetry so much?”

Two reasons:

a) I’m a poet, certainly, but I’m also a copywriter. That means if I’m doing some writing, especially for a company as big as TFL, I would like to be paid. Not fobbed off with the promise of ‘exposure’.

b) The bigger reason by far is that I knew that TFL would choose awful sort-of-rhyming dross over anything more creative. Crap Verse in Ads put their money where their mouth was and entered some actually awesome (but sure, superbleak) poetry:

Needless to say they didn’t win. Still think they were robbed. I would have smiled every time I got in the carriage, had the above piece won. 

Advertisers, it seems, can’t stay away from poetry. This despite poetry being a poor sales magnet in and of itself. This despite the fact they clearly don’t have much regard for the artform. Like the sort of person who sticks 17 lazy syllables down on paper and calls it a haiku, this lot rode roughshod over even the most basic elements of poetry in a six-line piece.

I imagine the conversation went along the lines of:

“We need to make this memorable. Really hammer the message home. But creatively. How about a song? Hmm, people remember songs.”

“Sir, this is on a poster.” 

“Right, right. Say, aren’t poems like songs without music? People kind of like poetry at funerals and weddings.”

“Um, I guess. But Sir, I’ve not written a poem since my GCSEs, and even then it was about why Camellia Smart wouldn’t let me try and find Radio Luxembourg behind the bike sheds.” 

“Ah, nobody will notice. You’re in Creative. Slap something together that fits in the space above the hipster art. Just make sure it rhymes. Honestly, if it rhymes...”

“Um...good times, Sir?”

“See? You’re a poet already!”

I’m not saying that Gertrude Stein is appropriate for a family-friendly, accessible poster (although how much fun would that be?), or that rhyme or light verse in general should be banished. Not at all, but light verse needn’t be shite verse (copyright Irving, K, 2016). I mean, they clearly paid a copywriter to do the original series of poems, so why in God’s name didn’t they think to HIRE A POET? 

Seriously, London is lousy with them. Many even (ahem) double up as copywriters! One free post on Artsjobs and the offer of a fair day rate would see you rolling in playful, imaginative writing, working with someone used to critique and editing and creative reworking.

One of the reasons these posters have caused so much rage (one Telegraph writer claimed they were behind his decision to flee London entirely) is how patronising they are. Not just because of the bouncy, nursery-rhyme rhythm (which could have been catchy) or the “We really do not mean to chide” passive-aggression, but also due to the brokenness and half-arsedness of the writing’s construction.

The worst part? I still ride the bus to the tinny unsch-unsch of someone’s rackety earphones. I still see litter everywhere. I still see people jamming open the doors and chowing smelly food and blocking carriages in a world of their own. Other than annoying commuters, the posters have had zero effect on bad conduct.

You know the cliche of people visiting a contemporary art gallery and claiming their six-year-old could do better than that? I put it to you that not only could a six-year-old write better poetry, but that their work would be a lot more memorable. 

I’m serious, TFL. Let’s get London’s schoolkids on the case. Contact Ministry of Stories, or one of the other creative writing organisations in this fine city. Nothing has a better effect on antisocial behaviour than being judged by a child. And pay them a fair rate while you’re at it.

[irvingwords]

Anxiety and freelancing: small ways to stay sane

Freelance writers should by rights be pretty happy. They make their own hours, they can run out for a coffee without comment and they’re being paid to write. After years of desk politics and endless meetings, the freelance life has the potential to be wonderful. Indeed, a report from early 2015, “Self-Employment in Europe” (Hatfield, Izzie, IPPR 2015), says that:

Self-employed workers have typically reported very high levels of satisfaction with their work. The European Social Survey reveals evidence which supports this: in 2010, 37 per cent of self-employed workers in Europe rated their job satisfaction as a 9 or 10, on a scale of zero to 10. This compares with just 26 per cent of those in employee jobs.

But as this Fast Company article points out, freelancers can be prone to serious depression and anxiety. And there we all were, thinking it was just us.

Common problems for freelancers include: too much work, not enough work, isolation, motivation and problematic clients. All this in addition to potential existing health problems and any number of variables or unexpected setbacks. It’s a lot to deal with, and particularly when remaining optimistic and upbeat is helpful for energy and client relations.

While workers employed by companies no doubt experience similar symptoms at times, the situation of a freelancer is such that every sick day they take is a day’s lost salary. Nonetheless, we must treat mental health as seriously as physical (i.e. if you’re incapacitated, take the day off). For days where there is a chance of pushing through, however, here are some moves I’ve found helpful. I hope some of them help you too:

1. Breathe

Seriously? Well, yes. If you’re prone to anxiety and panic in particular, practising breathing-based relaxation for ten minutes each day can really help centre you. I find getting hold of a youtube video of mindfulness meditation and having some quiet time just before bed really soothing. I feel more rested in the mornings and more able to roll with the punches during the day.

My experience is anecdotal, of course, but there’s a lot of scientific research into the role of mindfulness in promoting resilience. It builds up over the weeks, in sediments, so even a little each day makes a difference.

The best part? It’s free.

2. Make task lists

First thing. Before breakfast. Put ‘Breakfast’ on the task list. Put things you’ve done on the task list and cross them off immediately. If it helps,it’s legit.

I find mornings the most difficult part of the day. It’s the most likely time of day to be flooded with anxiety. So I make lists and map out my day. Having a list is like having a PA there to remind you not only what you must do, but what you could do, especially if you need a break from one task. Anxiety also thrives around uncertainty, so writing down specifics is a good way of defusing the stress bomb. Start the working day with the toughest things and include time for the more enjoyable aspects when those are done. Spoonful of sugar and all that.

Microtask lists are a slightly different animal, but no less helpful. These form more of a cache for low-energy times. Think about the tiniest tasks - we’re talking “Text so-and-so” or “Make a cup of tea” - that will help you make progress or feel better. That way, when your head’s in a whirl, there’s a stash of manageable tasks ready to be considered.

3. Get a sense of rhythm

It’s good to get to know your body clock in terms of productivity. Some people are most active at night, and others in the morning, so use the times of most energy for the toughest/least desirable jobs.

In her post on working from home, Passle Head of Marketing Claire Trevien describes her old PhD timetable as ”6am-1pm then 7-midnight”, following trial and error. You might be a night owl or an early bird. Test out different schedules and find out what works for you.

4. Eat at regular times

It’s very easy to work through lunch or skip breakfast. You might be ploughing through a big assignment or frantically trying to keep going because nothing seems to be yielding results. Either way, when your blood sugar drops, you will feel low and tired, or possibly even panicky, and likely get far less done. Keep some fruit or nuts to hand for energising snacks in the interim.

5. Walk

Or run. I prefer walking, though. Getting outside for a breath of fresh air is really good for energy levels, endorphins, ideas - you name it. Again, it’s free. It’s also a good excuse to talk to humans, which can provide a real boost when working from home.

6. Remember that brain breaks are not time wasting

Every hour, treat yourself to a read or a draw - something away from the computer and different to the work you’ve been doing. Time your break and return to work afterwards. Think of it as mental sorbet, cleansing the palate.

(OK, now I have brain freeze, but you get the idea).

7. Co-work with a friend

I don’t know about you, but I’m happiest working around others. Even if we don’t say that much, the feeling of having a friend close by helps me blaze through work, while solitude is the prime situation to drive me a little bit Jack Torrance. If that sounds like you too, and you have a friend who also works from home, suggest a day of co-working, for camaraderie, swapping thoughts and endless tea runs.

8. If you’re really low, talk to a friend or call Samaritans

Banish the idea that friends won’t want to talk to you in this state. Spending some time on the phone to a friend provides valuable human contact and can help put things into perspective. If you want to speak to someone more anonymously, a chat or email with the wonderful people at Samaritans might be the ticket. You don’t have to give a name, you don’t need to be suicidal and you don’t need to ‘prove’ in any way that you are ‘eligible’ to contact them. They’re just there to listen.

Talking to someone can really help to clear your mind, tap off some of that stress, and help you to:

9. Remember that you’re doing well

You are. It’s tough to work freelance, with the accompanying kite-tail of job roles in which we must excel. Even harder with mental health difficulties. Don’t beat yourself up for less productive days. Just focus on the positive. Each time you keep going instead of stopping, you’re doing fine work.

10. Reward yourself for a day well spent.

To quote the great Special Agent Dale Cooper:

If you’ve enjoyed this, you might like Madness in copywriting: the redundancy of offence

[irvingwords]

‘They’ is coming: putting gender on the writing agenda

(*Or should that be ‘They are coming’?)

Professional writers, from copywriters to journalists to novelists, seek clarity, and consistent grammar is the girder beneath every sentence. Even avant-garde poets need to know the rules before breaking them. Style guides run into hardback volumes and entire wikis, and debates rage across the internet on points of ambiguity. We don’t like not having an answer.

Which makes the issue of gender-fluidity very interesting indeed. Transphobia and discrimination against non-binary individuals hinge on a fear of the unknown. Not being able to categorise people by gender and assign traits to them accordingly, many people cast doubt on the validity of a person’s gender identity. You only have to glance at the news to see how openly celebrities like Jeremy Clarkson and Germaine Greer write off trans people as “the punchline in a stag night anecdote” or “not real women” (in the case of trans women).

Perversely, perhaps one way to embrace gender fluidity is to nail something down. A pronoun for general use or shorthand. Gender-Neutral Pronoun has a fantastic guide to the vast range of pronouns preferred by different non-binary people, from zhe to vis, and ideally, yes, we would ask everyone their preference and remember it. But in the meantime, to even keep the conversation about genderqueer issues rolling, we need to work with the language we have, to promote inclusivity in manageable steps. 

That’s why it’s time to get over hangups about using ‘they’ to refer to a single person. Having conducted an unscientific straw poll of non-binary friends on social media, most seem to be in agreement that ‘they’/’their’ is acceptable, where the conversation is not steamrolling an interviewee or specific subject’s preferences. 

As many have pointed out, the singular ‘they’ has been accepted as correct in works by Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen and Wilde, among others.

But there is still resistance. Part of this comes from a confusion about singular/plural disagreement (see the title of this post), but for my money, that’s a no-brainer. You write as feels right. Stick with “They are”/”They have” over “They is”/”They has” to avoid pirate-speak and keep the flow. English has so many exceptions, it can surely cope with one more.

There is also an issue of whether ‘they’ should be used only to talk about gender-neutral people, or whether we can realistically see it extending to all people, many of whom will resist ‘losing’ their gender on paper.

But the main difficulty I can see with the adoption of ‘they’ in this way is plain old resistance to change, and the fact that trans and genderqueer people are underrepresented in prominent roles, leaving their everyday problems marginalised and played down.

In a question to the Chicago Manual of Style, one correspondent swore they had seen the authority approve the use of ‘they’ as a singular pronoun. CMS replied:

“there was some regret at having written it, and we decided to abandon the idea for the fifteenth and sixteenth editions. Though some writers are comfortable with the occasional use of they as a singular pronoun, some are not, and it is better to do the necessary work to recast a sentence or, other options having been exhausted, use he or she.”

This raises two questions for me:

1. Who are these uncomfortable writers?

2. How many are non-binary?

In December, Mentalfloss reported that the Washington Post Style Guide now officially accepts ‘they’ as a gender-neutral pronoun. I sincerely hope they are the first of many.

As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

For more on gender in copywriting, check out my post on How To Speak to Women.

[irvingwords]

Late to the party: hyperhonesty in ads

This is a new segment I’m calling ‘Late to the the party’, in which I take the doctor’s advice and let things I’ve taken in settle for a while before responding.

This summer, there was positive press in the marketing mags for the “Refreshing Stuff” Oasis campaign created by The Corner. The campaign presented a meta look at its own advertising, lampshading the more cynical elements of the message.

Revealing the ulterior motive for the ad – one everyone knows on some level, but which is usually salved away by canny copy – was a bold move. The modern sales pitch normally forms the corsetry beneath the fine gown of the final edit. Feeling like you’re being sold to is a guaranteed turn-off, and every copy guide out there has advice on framing the call to action so as not to burst the bubble.

I like the idea of telling it straight, and the tie-in to the slogan, but for me as a consumer, it just doesn’t work.

Instead of feeling warmed by the conspiratorial tone, I feel rebuffed by its coldness. In my mind, there’s an unspoken “Get used to it”/”Suck it up”/”Deal” sitting there in place of the slogan.

It’s not so much a case of “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies” as “Talk to me, not at me.” I would have liked to feel that as a consumer I was getting a peek behind the scenes, not being told to lump it and cough up. 

[I would also add that the illustration of the drink itself feels anything but refreshing - its opacity reminds me of strawberry syrup or ketchup, and that doesn’t exactly make me want to chin a bottle of it.]

Other examples had varied success for me. 

The right-hand poster I do quite enjoy. It’s got a meekness to it that makes me think of Sgt Wilson in Dad’s Army asking if everyone wouldn’t mind awfully falling in. The left-hand example feels a bit too smug, with the joke falling on the reader. You don’t feel much like moneying someone who’s mocking you.

Overall, while I applaud a revival of the trend for honesty advertising (amid fond memories of the Marmite and Boddington’s adverts of yore), and the fun to be had there for copywriters and designers, for me this one doesn’t quite hit the spot.

[irvingwords]

Good Copy/Bad Copy #1: How to Speak to Women

So you want to sell to women? An honourable and lucrative aim - some women nowadays have money of their own, after all! But before you head in there, copy guns blazing, remember who you’re talking to. When it comes to sales copy, women really only respond to three things:

1. Well-worn cliches - women are soothed and reassured by familiar phrases. They thrive on safety and routine, so stick to gendered cultural references and create a womb of predictability in which your customer can curl up. 

2. Over-pally “you go, girlfriend” encouragement - because it is more or less a Total Fact that women derive their self-worth and motivation from the back of cosmetics bottles.

3. A complete absence of fun. Tongue-in-cheek teasing may work for men, but is bound to melt a woman’s snowflake-like confidence (NB: sometimes this can actually help your cause) and cause so-called feminists to gang up on you, so treat them with kid gloves. In addition to point #2, consider putting some reassuring pseudoscience in there. Women can do science too!

Let’s check out two examples from the world of shampoo (a world women know only too well), one that seductively screams “Wench, buy me, lest thy eyelashes fall out” and one that wilfully ignores agreed gender cues in favour of (shudder) creativity.

Let’s start with the good, shall we?

Note the way in which the copywriter has cleverly remembered that if there’s one thing women love just as much as shampoo, it’s working out to make themselves look fit. And in many ways, washing your hair is just as challenging as doing sit-ups. If your hair looks strong, so do you, right? Bonus points for the ‘personal trainer’ tone of voice. This is a bottle that says “Hats off to the modern Joan of Arc!”

Now we’ve had the sublime, let’s move on to the bafflingly dissident:

I mean, what were they thinking? Why would you even joke about our target goddess being an 86-year-old bell hop? Don’t they realise that is the actual worst nightmare of every living woman? Sure, it’s actually witty and conversational without being cloying, and sure, it’s incredibly well-written, but where is the reassurance? Where is the sex appeal? Who will tell us about magnoflavins and sheenscreen fractomolecules? Where is our John Wayne/prairie son? Where, oh where, is our beauty high-five?

I don’t know. Anyone would think they’d never met a real woman.

[irvingwords]

Five Twitter accounts winning at words

The Twitter character limit, like a strict poetic form, may be maddening for some, but it’s been the mother of invention for others. Balance the bad news, bile and babble in your newsfeed with five accounts which put the play into wordplay.

1. @happybirthtime​

Thank you to @gojonstonego for introducing me to this one. The main Happy Birthtime Magazine takes the form of a joyously deranged tumblr. Celebrating celebrity ‘birthtimes’, it illustrates them with close-but-no-cigar pictures, wobbly ‘facts’ and bags of enthusiasm (not to mention the ongoing fable of St Christime and his wife Waverley, and Rodney the Christmas Crocodile).

Happy Birthtime’s Twitter presence is one glorious necklace of riffs on this theme. Like a pantoum or haiku, though, there’s a strict formula to follow for optimal Birthtime wishing:

It’s a perfectly compact volley of jokes, from the photo to the age to the name to the totally wrong exclamation at the end. Happy Birthtime, one and all!

2. @a_single_bear

Something a little quieter now, with a journey into the forest. A Bear shares the musings of, well, a bear, as they wander through their world. Existential, innocent and poetic, it manages to avoid the twee precipice, and takes your senses for a refreshing walk outdoors. 

Many posts end in the refrain: “I am a bear.”. Perhaps, in a confusing world, this is the one thing a bear can be sure of.

3. @ghost_things & @fuckeveryword​

I’ve put these two together as they’re both bots (or at least, very botlike) doing the same thing with different results. Indeed, there are many bots doing similar things, but these two stood out for me.

@ghost_things takes random nouns and simply adds ‘ghost’ to the front.

While @fuckeveryword​ does what it says on the tin, running through the dictionary cursing every damned word in there.

Both accounts benefit from dipping in, or spotting the occasional one, rather than reading down the feed. @ghost_things has a dreamlike quality to it, and indeed might be useful for story ideas, as you imagine meeting a ghost waitress or what you might use as ghost bait.

@fuckeveryword​ is, by contrast, refreshingly blunt. Retweeting from here feels by turns mischievous, cathartic and wilfully childish, whether it be the motivational “fuck doubt” or the stubbed-toe rage of “fuck doorstops”.

4. @MobyDickatSea

Aaaand after the lowbrow comes the culture. Purely and simply, @MobyDickatSea takes a novel many people will never find time or energy to wade through and shares choice morsels of its rich, poetic landscape. Out of context, the fragments take on a life of their own, and as someone who loves the novel, it’s helped me to enjoy Melville’s use of language all over again. Especially the humour.

5. @shitpoetsgoogle

Finally, draw inspiration from others’ desperation. At some point, every writer has to sully their browser history for the sake of art. A slightly more interactive feed than the others in this list, @shitpoetsgoogle (now officially Shit Writers Google) invites authors of every stripe to share their strangest queries, and lets us imagine a) how many candlelit whiskies had fuelled them and b) what on earth they were writing.

What’s your favourite use or abuse of Twitter? Comment here or tweet me @KoftheTriffids.

[irvingwords]

Get playful this New Year and cleanse your writing palate

Ahead of New Year, I’ve just been enjoying this list of curious customs from around the world, which includes flaming scarecrows, holding parties in which everything must be round and wearing colourful underwear. 

While for some of us, a good effigy-burning is all in a weekend’s work, these snapshots got me thinking. The themes running through these traditions are hope, prosperity and play, and this sense of youth and optimism runs through lively, energised writing.

Taking inspiration from the Danes and their New Year’s chair springing, I’ve come up with three short exercises which will hopefully see you leaping into the new year.

1. Discover a random poem a day.

There’s a reason writers in all forms keep banging on about the importance of poetry. Poetry disrupts language, and when you’ve been staring at a blank Word doc for an hour, nothing eases creative constipation like a spot of mucking about. Repetition, assonance, puns - poetry and copywriting have a lot in common.

It can be hard to know where to start with poetry, short of going to any books on the shelf and re-reading familiar pieces. So pick any non-poetry book on your shelf, flick through and take the first noun you find. Enter it into the Poetry Foundation website, or Poem Hunter and see what takes your fancy from the search results. 

Read actively and trust your instincts - poetry is too often avoided because the reader feels their opinion is not justifiable, or that the piece is too complex for them. Good poetry should have something to say, whether you’ve read one or one thousand pieces in your life. Write down three things you like and three you don’t like about your chosen poem, to keep your critical faculties sharp.

2. Do a spot of collage.

Put aside notions of pasta pictures and conceptual pieces involving bodily fluids and bear with me on this one. Like poetry, the joy of collage (which can sometimes be poetry anyway) comes from disruption and discord, placing one text next to, or on top of, another to form a new creation altogether.

Lay aside twenty minutes, scissors, Pritt Stick and those old copies of National Geographic and let loose with surprising phrasing, clanging tonal shifts and the challenge of making sentences run on (or not). For copywriters not used to thinking about graphic design, playing with images and determining text placement on the page exercises a new part of your creativity.

And don’t worry about it not making perfect sense, as long as it conveys a sense. Here’s one I made earlier:

3. Brain splurge

In his book Copywriting: Successful Writing for Design, Advertising and Marketing, Mark Shaw recommends building a word bank at the start of each assignment. Once the brief has been cleared, and the tone of voice confirmed, write down every word that fits within those constraints, however tenuous.

As an exercise, I’ve always found this useful, particularly for long lists of product descriptions. Before your brain gets too tired, you can raid it for creative words and set them down to pick from later.

One way of playing with this when writing is to combine your word bank with images. Make a Pinterest board (or several), and fill it with any colours, expressions, pop culture references that fit with what you’re writing. Keep going at this for a few minutes, quickly and without overthinking things, and you’ll be surprised how far the branches reach from the original trunk of the brief, while still remaining relevant.

I’d love to hear your suggestions for rejuvenating weary writing (try saying that with a mouth full of stollen), so feel free to comment, tweet me at @KoftheTriffids or message me. Happy New Year everyone!

[irvingwords]

Playing with words: copywriting for toys

Kirsten Irving reflects on the doublethink of writing about children’s toys in a way that appeals to adults.

A post I wrote for the Professional Copywriters Network on cuddles, puns and the pitfalls of accidental smut.

[irvingwords]

A Hash of Inspiration: The Pun Game as Marketing Tool

Ever looked at a corporate hashtag and thought “Who voluntarily uses that?” The short answer is normally “Someone who wants to win free stuff”. Without such incentives, though, there is a fine art to convincing the denizens of Twitter to take your message to their heart/feed.

Every brand dreams of appearing in the hallowed left-hand Trending column, without paying for the privilege. Major sports and entertainment events are always going to create a buzz, and then there are less predictable trends (‘Smash’, anyone? ‘London’?), which hit the sweet spot by pure serendipity. For the regular Twitter user, following trends that promise no clear reward is about feeling part of a community. One popular trend provides a major opportunity for creativity in marketing.

At any given time, a pun-based game will be trending on Twitter, and more often than not, it will be for little or no reward. The reward for the user comes firstly with the satisfaction of coming up with a good pun and secondly from the acknowledgement of the tweet. Take for example the #RuinAMagazine game trending as I write. It’s not been organised by a company or promoted, but it’s captured the community’s imagination. So much so that it’s extended beyond mere text entries into lavishly Photoshopped images.

A brilliant example of a business embracing these games was the @Foyles #BookGame. Each Thursday, the independent book chain would set a topic and invite users to tweet their best thematic rejigs of book titles. There was a modest prize – books, of course – but the real value came in the kudos and the community. Show off your knowledge of books and your linguistic gymnastics, enjoy the sheer geekery and get your efforts retweeted by a cult bookstore.

The regularity, flexibility and thematic coherence of the game made it hugely popular. Too popular, almost. Foyles faced good-natured outcry when they finally closed it down.

Once Foyles had relinquished #BookGame in 2011, mainstream rivals Waterstones attempted to appropriate it in conjunction with a hard-sell link. Breaking the spell of playing for playing’s sake (and a handful of books), they broke the golden copywriting rule: if someone realises they’re being sold to, they will stop reading. Thankfully, the original #BookGame spirit prevailed and the game was adopted by independent bookshop @PetersBooks, minus the clumsy corporate drive.

The lesson to learn from this is one about human nature. A hashtag that invites engagement works if it requires a little effort and creativity on the part of the reader. This, importantly, is not seen as work or hassle but fun and satisfying. As philosopher Bernard Suits put it, playing a game is “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Why would we do that? Because we just love a good challenge. As for this particular format, pun games work simply and effectively with Twitter’s short-form restrictions: they’re short, they’re quick and they’re an instant contribution to a community activity. As the old maxim says:

Originally posted by the author on the Copy That blog.

[irvingwords]

Madness in Copywriting: the redundancy of offence

Every so often, you'll see a story like this pop up in the paper: 

'Don’t get mad, take lithium': Joy’s greeting card branded offensive to those with mental health issues

And reliably, as soon as the weary sub-editor hits Publish and the story goes live, the tired protests over oversensitivity, political correctness and freedom of speech are wheeled out for some air: We can't do anything in case it offends a minority, it's just a joke, there are bigger problems in the world than a card, don't you miss the good old days when we could say anything and we didn't have to say 'sanity-challenged', etc.

As someone who does live with mental health problems, I'm not offended by this card. I'm deeply saddened and I'm concerned that it's been so casually tossed out there to make money from laughing at people with bipolar. But I'm not offended. Why not?

1. Offence is a very insular concept. To say one is offended is to say "this insults my worldview". Removing the problem from a social context allows a company to reduce the complaint to a few isolated voices. It also attributes a personal stake for the complainant in the situation changing, and while this may be true, it's not a strong position to argue from. Better to frame the debate in terms of the real risk to a broader group.

2. What does 'offence' even mean? It conjures images of sour-faced individuals posing for the local newspaper with their arms folded, in front of a graffiti penis. Since most companies produce their content to emotionally appeal to consumers, is it not better to point out how hurtful and triggering the sight of such a card might be, and indeed how potentially damaging to an already vulnerable group of people?

3. To express that something causes you offence allows the offending entity to pigeonhole you, and reduce your complaint down to a symptom of an agenda. Mocking bipolar only hurts bipolar people, after all! In the car crash of Twitter replies that issued forth from the Joy account regarding the lithium cards, we encountered such gems as:

If thine right eye offend thee, and all that.

4. It is remarkably easy to ignore or write off 'offence' as a concept, and therefore ignore the very real misery brought about by a thoughtless or cruel action. Think of the passive-aggressive grievance buffer of "I'm sorry you feel that way." See this (presumably non-bipolar) tweeter's chipper defence of a vulnerable corporate entity against the tyranny of Twitter.

The Fry quote is interesting, if problematic (like the man himself), and I can't help feeling it's unfinished. To express being offended is not "a whine". It's simply an ineffective, official-sounding way of saying "That did not feel right to me, and I desperately want it to stop." We need to stop using "I am offended" as a way of avoiding pinpointing exactly what it is that is causing the pain. Once we have the root cause, shucked of its rhetorical casing, we can begin to reword in a more inclusive socially-aware way.

Originally posted by the author on the Copy That blog.

[irvingwords]

Thanks to lhjarkko for this gem. One for anyone who’s ever tried learning another language. https://twitter.com/lhjarkko/status/525941745235013632