Читать книгу Metacopywriting. Mindfulness in advertising text - Natalia Maiorova - Страница 6

Information is the content, facts, a brief (a client’s questionnaire); it is specifics. If I want to write some information, I ask myself: what do I want to say? Information is something new that I tell the reader.

Meaning is an aim, an idea, a sense, or a significance. If I want to determine the meaning, I ask myself: why do I want to say this? The first answer is for nothing. That is alright. By default, there is enough of everything in the universe, it does not need your texts. This must be accepted and forgotten. The second answer is for myself; the most honest answer, actually. All authors write for great reasons for sure; to change the world, but we write for ourselves, because we love to write, we need to write, we cannot live without it and we enjoy it. After all, when you have accepted that your text is not needed and you write for yourself, you can give the third answer – I write to tell people something. Selling texts, copywriting, and mass-media texts are the kind of text that is written to ‘tell people’ something, because you could live without this text and the readers did not ask for it, but you should write it to tell about a product.

The meaning is what you mean, but you are not saying it directly, although the meaning can be said aloud: it is a thesis, a theme, sometimes it is a title. Ivan Krylov, a well-known Russian fabulist, prescribed the meaning of each fable with the words: “the moral of this fable is…” But at the end of the advertising text, you do not write “this text is published to arouse your trust” or “I wrote a post so that you sympathize” or “This ad encourages you to buy a toothbrush”. Nevertheless, we use conversion phrases (call-to-action): “Buy our new pesticide-free cucumbers”. This task we will consider in selling text structure. Now, we are discussing what prevents us from writing, so up to this moment, we have two questions: WHAT do I want to say and WHY do I want to say it. If you already have the information (you interviewed your client or you have something to say), you know WHAT you want to say and you can put it down. Some people really do not know what they want to say, that is why they spend hours in front of a blank sheet of paper. They should get some information in order to express the clients’ opinion or their own (depending on the goal).

Well, you know WHAT you want to say, but still spend time in front of the blank, white sheet. What is next? You should ask the third question: HOW do I want to say it? ‘HOW’ is a strategy, a method, a process. ‘HOW’ is a composition (structure), grammar (editing) and the way I write. This way is called freewriting – the best way to write. I learned about it from Mark Levy’s Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content