Creative Copywriting for the Web and

Books that Help

I have recently had the pleasure of taking a continuing studies class at SFU called The Art and Craft of Creative Selling taught by Hamish McIntosh. Hamish does a great job of mixing his vast professional experience with some of the technical aspects of copywriting and adds many examples of the different media where we see copy.

Hamish's copywriting class had given me a lot of different ways to approach copy with creativity but he admittedly didn't touch too much on the technical side of the game (which I should have probably taken a class called Technical Aspects of Copywriting for). Hamish took a lot of gems from an interesting, amusing and informative book he recommended to us called Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan. I definitely recommend this read for a person trying to get their creativity bug buzzing.

If you are trying to get into more of a technical mindset, I recommend reading Maria Veloso's book Web Copy that Sells. This book is far more technical and gets to the mechanical point of how to write copy for the web. It explains psychological triggers, the do's and don't, what words to use...etc.

One thing to always remember is how we live in an age of scanning. No one has time to read anymore (especially online), so we have to cater the copy to someone who wants a few words to stand out and a summing up of the point. Gone are the days of putting things in context and the giving of substance to back our thoughts up. We want the goods, the meat and potaters(in this day and age, the "salmon and arugula") and we want them NOW.

I will be going over these technical aspects in my next post entitled Copywriting for the Web - Writing Great Headlines.