Elective; 7:1 Copywriting

The first session for the copywriting elective began with Brian Sheppard and Paul Burke, both whom are well experienced in the copywriting industry.

Paul began by telling the class about himself and his origin as a copywriter. He said some interesting things I took note of such as "Never waste a word." "Sorry if this letter is too long, I didn't have time to write a short one" "When writing, know your start and your ending so you can experiment with whatever happens in between."

We looked at tone of voice in writing. Paul mentioned Innocent smoothies tone of voice which began as informative and friendly but overtime has become needy and annoying.

Your tone of voice depends on who you're talking to and how they want to be spoken to.

We began with a practice task to envision how a brand would come across at a party + their tone of voice. My group chose Apple:

We also for the next session, had to give our branded person a dirty little secret. Some advice given was that it's much easier to do this for a brand you dislike because you're more likely to gloss over the bad stuff for a brand you do like.

I changed mine to Facebook, who's dirty secret was that he is a stalker inspired by Facebook's lack of privacy for it's users.

We also looked at names. What's in a name? How does it look, sound, perceived. Our task was also to create a name for new prime minister - something memorable and fits their personality. Our group came up with Ted Wilson which later we found out at the class vote for the best name, if we had changed it to Ed Wilson we would've won because Ted/Theodore is an American name. The name that won was George Wright.

This session really taught me the importance of tone of voice and how much goes into naming. Different names carry different connotations so it's important to use your experience and research to find what works best.