Posts Tagged 'copywriting'

Ugly Business

Published December 20, 2011 Uncategorized , Writing 2 Comments
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[Mercifully not what it may sound like, though the temptation is there].

There’s a real internal challenge in play. Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the art of quality writing. Some lucky souls can churn out thousands of quality words every day, but most of us mere mortals will always struggle with that.

I want my own page to represent a benchmark for thoughtful writing. If it takes a week or a month to make the right statement, then so be it. After all, if you’re hoping to make £150+ per day as a copywriter, the very least you can aim for is to showcase ‘quality’.

In 2011, I’ve finally embraced the rule that less is more. As a doctoral student, it’s natural for verbosity to take over while the 80,000 word target still seems distant. Pages – thousands of words – achieve nothing. Now that this pressure has relaxed, I’ve realised the pleasure in shedding words.

Continue reading ‘Ugly Business’

Private Pursuits: The Difficulty of Writing

Published November 15, 2010 Knightmare , Music , research , Writing 4 Comments
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Autograph from Dr. Adam Fox

Writing is hard. It is harder still when fighting battles with yourself.

Yet this is trampled on completely when November’s fad of eleven years, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, comes around. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel by November 30th.

Like many other things around me at the moment, it is an alien existence. It has taken me three years to come close to 50,000 words for my thesis. Writers will be soon be surpassing that toil in less than 3% of the time.

NaNoWriMo has received a lot of strong opinion, largely because it encourages quantity over quality. The official page freely concedes, ‘Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of crap’.

Sometimes I have sympathy for the freedom, precisely because adding 500 words of quality to my doctoral thesis seems like a colossal achievement. It is also something that, for better or worse, the world of academia has contemplated itself. But I also loathe it for the way it can disregard the graft that goes into a small amount.

Writing often delves into dark, private pursuits. Continue reading ‘Private Pursuits: The Difficulty of Writing’

Keeping Ahead of the Game

Published October 10, 2010 research , Writing 6 Comments
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self-marketing

Image lifted from Rob Cubbon's excellent guide to self-marketing.

Timing is everything.

I recently completed my first ever assignment as a freelance copywriter. As happy coincidences go, the same day saw a long overdue catch-up with expert of the trade, London based copywriter, Al Allday.

Such meetings, I cannot deny, offer me a mixture of encouragement and trepidation. Our career paths lie roughly in the same direction. Al hit the motorway, while I’m still navigating the long way round. While back-street manoeuvring supposedly makes you a better driver, motorways get you from A to B in the best way. Without doubt, following Al has made me a better writer.

Writing, many people don’t realise, must be split into disciplines. Continue reading ‘Keeping Ahead of the Game’

Something Hard: Struggles in Self-Marketing

Published April 6, 2010 Geneva , Knightmare , research , Television 1 Comment
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self-marketing

Image lifted from Rob Cubbon's excellent guide to self-marketing.

PhD students typically do not market themselves very well.

PhD students are typically modest about their abilities.

PhD students do not always believe in their achievements.

Training programmes for research postgraduates now include a number of courses and events related to career development. These include CV workshops, presentation skills, interview skills, and so on. These messages, imparted from the courses, are their raison d’être, and they strike a strong chord.

It is a relief that these deficiencies affect a much broader cross-section than just me. But a concern of much greater weight is that scepticism about the value of this long-haul degree and where it will lead means a struggle to climb out of this bracket. How can one believe in their strengths, abilities, and the weight of your achievements if the growing concern is how weak their current course of life will leave them?

To an extent, this is going to revolve around occupation and personality. Some people recognize their aptitude for sales. Some recognize their aptitude for caring professions. The difficulty is in traversing boundaries, which is where the most-accosted ‘transferable skills’ come in.

Continue reading ‘Something Hard: Struggles in Self-Marketing’

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