Read Me

Q&A If you’re aware of the questions a reader might ask then cut to the chase and just answer them. Obviously this depends on knowing what your audience are actually after – there’s nothing quite as sad as Frequently Asked Questions that no one asks, frequently or otherwise. They make a brand look lazy and irrelevant.

A meme, Dawkins wrote, is much like its biological cousin the gene. Like a gene, a meme is a selfreplicating unit of information. However, memes don’t replicate biologically; instead they’re passed around in the form of ideas. Dawkins described memes as the ‘basic unit of cultural transmission’. He notes: ‘Just as genes propagate themselves by movi

It also pays to keep your paragraphs tight – in most situations five sentences are plenty. If a paragraph is running away with you then divide it in two.

Plenty of real-world copywriting isn’t writing at all, it’s editing and reworking existing text. To get you comfortable in this role we want you to redraft the following chunk of copy – taken from a fictional airline print ad – in one of the structures we suggested earlier: •Issues>implications>actions •Past>present>future •Context>a

Inverted triangle The classic newspaper-story format. Start with a grabby headline, followed by the main points, before moving to detailed information and analysis.

If you want to be a good writer you need to write every day.

No, going from nothing to something is a four-stage process during which you research, plan, write and review.

a slogan as: ...a statement of such merit about a product or service that it is worthy of continuous repetition in advertising, is worthwhile for the public to remember, and is phrased in such a way that the public is likely to remember it.

The great American novelist Elmore Leonard summed this up nicely when he said, ‘If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’

One of the most important things the brief should tell you is who you’re writing for. We’ve dedicated a whole lesson to this later in the book, but for now we’ll just say you must know who your readers are in order to write effectively for them.