conversation is an engine

Your words make me so mad—and that’s good

words can wake us to the believable center of our purpose

I spend my days poring over texts. Reading internal notes and documents. Rereading interviews and meeting notes. Writing questions, asking those questions and writing the answers. And sometimes rereading the answers. Then I start making texts: mind-maps and cartoons and diagrams for starters. Then the short (or sometimes long) text that will go back to my client—ordered arguments and assertions. Emotive elements. Narrative. Jokes and anecdotes—whatever it takes to communicate the essence of what I take as my client’s central point.

And then I send it to them.

And they react.

Reactions vary from “you are right except for this point” to “that’s fine” (the worst possible reaction, it means my copy was so bland it stirred exactly nothing) to “you nailed what we’ve not been able to say” (my favorite reaction) to “We are deeply offended by this.” That last is my second favorite reaction—it means I got under their skin, though not in a good way.

And then we trim the right copy as a text for the target audience.

What’s remarkable is how the process of sorting through all the internal dialogue and the organization’s unexamined thought actually helps in finding the believable center of the organization’s identity. It’s got to be believable because if you can’t imagine an employee saying it with a straight face, you’ve not hit it. It’s got to believable or the promise won’t match reality—and that never gains traction with the target publics.

But the words themselves—right there on the page—can stir such a reaction from the client that they can sometimes catch a quick vision of what they aren’t. Or what they are. And that glimpse carries forward to what a team does next. And that glimpse can fold backwards into how an organization thinks about and treats itself.

That’s why copywriting is fun.

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Image via 2headedsnake