I know I’ve taken time here to mock people like PETA, the Daily Mail and really bad PR companies, but their crimes against marketing and writing pale in comparison to something I saw this morning.
A piece of copy so confusing, so overwrought and so terrible, that professionals don’t even know what it means.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the greatest paragraph of the year.
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Hey! Remember the 2000’s?
The “Naughties”. The “Noughties”. Whatever you choose to call the first decade of the new millennium, you’ll have to agree on one thing.
We’ve seen some absolutely stunning marketing. And some complete dross.
My marketing masterpiece of the 2000s seems to have been lifted from Withnail and I, whereas the marketing misfire probably wouldn’t even make it into Horne & Corden.
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Photo by Pedro Klien
Copywriters can generally be grouped into one of two camps. Those who ride roughshod over the rules of grammar and taste in order to get their message out, and those who are sticklers for the laws of the language.
I count myself very much in the former group, but there are a number of common copy mistakes that offend even my loose sense of what’s grammatically right or wrong.
Do blunders make your blood boil, or do you sympathise with the slipups of simpletons? Either way, you’ll be familiar with these five copy mistakes
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Photo by inuyaki
It’s said that copywriters have to do with the written word what good salespeople do verbally. Most of the time we work like car salespeople – someone will wander into our website or showroom, wondering if they should part with their hard-earned cash. We’ll then use our tricks, techniques and wiles to worm our way into their wallets. We get paid, they get a product, everyone wins.
But what about the copy equivalent of the door to door salesperson? Well, they can be just terrible.
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