Comments on: 10 Copywriting Nightmares & How to Deal With Them

By: Name withheld to protect the innocent

Name withheld to protect the innocent — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:21:11 +0000

Re: writer's block. Naps are effective! Unless you get into REM and then you'd better hope that you dream something brilliant to make up for lost productivity. Nice post, thanks!

By: Joseph McCullough

Joseph McCullough — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:43:38 +0000

Good read! #2 is extremely important…especially for choosing a business name. My previous sole proprietorship, mcculloughdesigns.com, was only 1 letter away from mcculloughdesign.com. Woops!

By: Alconcalcia

Alconcalcia — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:42:40 +0000

Reading item I on the list I was reminded of a time when, because it was a new bit of business, I went along to a briefing clearly suffering from a heavy cold that then developed into man flu (no, really!). Anyway, client was very sympathetic, gave a good brief and, eager to impress, I cracked on with the project as soon as possible.
I delivered well within the timescale several options upon the same theme, all of which I had gone over with a fine tooth comb and all of which I was happy with in terms of answering the brief and putting out a good message to their particular marketplace. The only problem was, my enthusiasm went against me as, having decided to get the job done a day early I almost clean forgot that I had a doctor’s appointment and as I wrote the email to the client with my rationale and copy attached, I had just 15 minutes in which to get to the surgery.
The result? I typed out an email through bleary, blurry eyes full of the aforementioned man flu, pressed ‘send’ and rushed off to get cured of an ailment that no woman is yet to understand.
When I came back from the docs I decided to double check that the email had gone and gave it a quick read through. Shock horror, it had about five typos in it! Not major ones, but mistakes nonetheless.
The upshot was that, despite me delivering word perfect copy with not a grammatical blemish or mis-dotted ‘i’ or ‘t’ in it, the would-be client blew me out on the grounds that if I couldn’t write an email properly, how could she trust me with her copy work? Try as I might to explain that I was dying that particular day but was keen to please and deliver ahead of schedule, and anyway, the actual work had been spell checked a thousand times and contained no howlers, she was adamant. Goodbyesville. A beautiful relationship over before it had even begun and a huge lesson learned.
By the way, did I mention that women don’t understand man flu?

By: Michael Bertoldi

Michael Bertoldi — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:36:20 +0000

Great post Emma! Perhaps my favorite was #9. Haha! It’s not always the client that wants copy changes. Sometimes it’s your creative director. I remember my last creative director would sometimes make my writing better, sometimes make it worse. If you find yourself really attached to a word or phrase and it gets the axe, you just have to go to your creative director and say “Yo, I really liked that line.” They’ll probably let you throw it back in the copy.
Nice post!