Tag: Words matter

Dead Sons

My two favorite TV dramas, “Rescue Me” and “Deadwood”, wound up their 2005 seasons by killing off a major character’s young son in a bicycle accident. I thought the device was appropriate in the Victorian confines of “Deadwood”, over the top in “Rescue Me” where the characters are already spinning out of control with no need for a deus ex machina.

But the bigger question is how two inspired screenwriting teams settled on the same out-of-the-blue plot device. I think it’s more than coincidence. Going back to Orestes, the classic dramatic arc is that the parent dies, there is a struggle, then a son (or daughter) emerges as the successor tested by fire. (True, Abraham did offer to sacrifice his son, but God spared him.)

To go the other direction, with the child dead before the parent, is an tragedy that’s maybe symptomatic of these writers’ world view and, if we keep seeing it, maybe of our culture. The death of a child, whose life is the older character’s reason to live on at least some level, represents an implosion. There’s no longer an heir to the world the character is striving to create. The hurt can diminish with time, but never go away. One goes on, but one’s world is smaller.

I know, this doesn’t have much to do with advertising. Unless you see popular culture as a mirror of current moods, in which case our customers and prospects could use some good news and cheering up.

How to write so people will read

An insurance company recently asked me to teach an in-house version of my copywriting course. The audience was mostly lawyers who write white papers on various legal topics. Since the scope was much broader than advertising, I retitled the course “how to make people read what you write”. I added two points which I think are worth repeating here:

1. Virtually everybody you are writing to has grown up with television, or at least movies, which means they have been trained to make mental edits when the communicator jumps from connection to another. What’s more, they EXPECT these jumps in the material they absorb and if you take pains to write with a smooth transition, they’ll just pass over the transitional paragraphs and move on to the next topic.

This means you need to write for scanning, not word-for-word reading. It also means you need to be aware of how the mind handles mental edits, and make transitions much as a film editor would. Cut from the big picture to a closeup, instead of showing two slightly different views of the same thing. When something is important, showcase it (=a closeup shot) and then establish context (=a person reacting).

I read a lot of “Magic Schoolbus” books with my 3 year old and I notice a wide range of skill levels in the cartoon factory workers who draw these. When the same character appears, in a similar context, on two facing pages, then Eli says “why are there two Carloses?” When the narrative talks about a giant squid that doesn’t show up in the picture, he says “where’s the giant squid?” He already has a well-formed system to tell him how stories should be told with words and visuals—and your older reader does too.

2. Dr. Johnson said that “knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” White papers fall into the second category of knowledge, as do a marketer’s informational premiums. It isn’t necessary for the audience to read all the way through; the author has done his or her job if the reader glances at the first page, accepts that the paper is making an authoritative analysis of a topic, then files it for future reference.

On the other hand, you may fail even when communicating valuable information if the paper is poorly organized and hard to get at. This isn’t to say that presentation is more important than information. But if presentation falls short, the reader will never gain access to the information and the writer is judged a sorry failure.

The Robert Collier Letter Book

Early in my copywriting career, I stumbled across the Robert Collier Letter Book at the L.A. Central Library. Discovering it was out of print, I flirted with telling them I’d lost it… and soon wished I had, because the only copy was lost when the library burned down.

Now, the Robert Collier Letter Book is available once again via the web (use this Amazon link). It’s just as relevant and meaty as I remembered. Robert Collier was an early “Giant of the Mails” who shared his knowledge in 1937, but people are people and selling is selling so most of it still applies today. For example:

“All of us are consciously, or unconsciously, using ‘TESTED SELLING SENTENCES’ from morning, noon till night. Some of us use them to sell ideas, others service and others actual merchandise.

“Little Willy wants an extra slice of bread and jam; sister wants 15 cents for the movies; Dad is scheming how to get out of the house for lodge that night, and Mother is planning to have Dad sweep out the cellar–while around the corner the Preacher is planning a visit on the household to make it more church conscious and one and all, have their own pet ‘TESTED SELLING SENTENCES’ they plan to use on one another!”

If you work in marketing or selling, or even if you don’t, I say: get this book.