JLB » Copywriting

Beauty of Brevity

Joel — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:02:05 +0000

When I was a student, I regularly turned in papers that were well below the assigned word count. I never really meant to…they just sort of turned out that way. Yet, in spite of my detour from the letter of the law, my grade on a given paper was almost always among the highest in the class.

With a bit of hindsight, I’ve realized that the brevity of my writing was likely a key to my academic success. Those professors probably assigned 3,000 words on “King Lear” because their experience told them that most students would need that much space to get around to saying anything. I said something, but left out the filler — even though I’d wager that I spent more time writing five pages than many of my classmates spent writing eight.

While my pared-down writing style wasn’t intentional( it was just the only way I knew how to write), I’m finding now that my natural tendency towards less over more serves me well as a copywriter. If my professors, staring down a stack of ungraded essays, appreciated seeing the a compact arrangement of the essential ideas, the average website visitor probably appreciates it more. Most of the time, folks on the Web want to find the desired information quickly and with minimum effort.

Of course, in copywriting, merely including the relevant information isn’t enough. Style and syntax are critical if the text is to have any life on the page (or screen). In truth, the smaller the body of text, the more carefully these various elements have to be balanced. Add to that a need to keep SEO in mind (keywords, headings, etc.) when writing specifically for the Web.

Condensing all of the previously mentioned elements in to a seamless bit of text is one of the most satisfying and challenging tasks I perform at JLB. The work can be mentally exhausting, but a result both that appears effortless and tells the client’s story is well worth the struggle.

Bean: Cheap and Easy

Joel — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:46:59 +0000

Before about ten months ago, I had never written anything on a computer without first opening Microsoft Word; and I rarely wrote anything that wasn’t a essay, research paper, short story, or poem. But when I bought a Macbook this January, I opted to keep Microsoft off of my computer and went in search of an alternative. First, I never really liked Word. It always seemed powerful, but also somehow too complicated for the basic requirements of most my writing. A second big motivation in this switch was cost of the MS Office suite. $150 seems steep for one program that serves such a basic role and several bundled large programs that I rarely use like Excel and PowerPoint.

Since that time, NeoOffice, which is available for free (although donations are encouraged), has been my primary word processor. While it may be a bit less polished than Word, NeoOffice generally gets the job done and feels similar enough to Word to be quickly usable without making too many major adjustments or learning too many new tricks. Still, NeoOffice also retains some of the hassles of Word. It’s big and slow and ponderous, and it tends to auto-correct and auto-format to the point of pushiness. I spent half an hour last week trying to figure out how to prevent the program from auto-formatting an outline that I was making for a web page. I never did find a solution to the problem, because I eventually gave up and just copied all of my work over to TextEdit. Thirty minutes that I have to research a function of my word processor is thirty minutes that I’m not writing.

TextEdit is an application I’ve found myself double-clicking more and more often since starting at JLB Works around a month ago. This is partly for its function as a HTML text editor, but I’ve also used it for basic composition. The application is visually dull and light on features, but it opens quickly and doesn’t try to predict all of my formatting preferences. It’s been my go-to option for jotting down a quick note or a login name or producing a group of meta tags for HTML. In its defense, I don’t think that it is intended to be a serious writing tool, and if it is, I find it personally too limited and uninspiring for lengthier compositions.

Enter Bean. Bean is a simple word processor based on the structure of TextEdit, but with a few additional writer-friendly features: perhaps most notably, live word count, adjustable page margins, and control over headers and footers. Programmed by a writer of fiction, Bean was designed to stay out of the way of the creative process and let writers get their thoughts down with minimal fuss. For me, Bean does exactly that.

Bean’s default format is the versatile .rtfd format, but it also allows the user to save into nine other formats, including Word’s .doc file format. There are serious limitations to Bean’s compatibility with Word’s formatting, but the point is, a Word user can read a file from Bean and vice versa.

I can’t claim with certainty that my search for a word processor is over. I may take a closer look at Apple’s relatively affordable iWork Pages in the future, revert back to the industry standard of Word when I have a bit more money in my pocket, or get adventurous and play around with one of the many other options for word processing on a Mac. But for the moment, Bean is hitting the sweet spot between functionality, simplicity, and good looks. With this app, I can focus on writing and ignore the writing tool.

Bringing in the big guns…

Julian — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:53:25 +0000

You may know that JLB WORKS specializes in copywriting, copyediting and SEO markup. But did you know that we take those roles very seriously?

So seriously, in fact, that we have decided to bring in a ringer. That's right. JLB has recently hired a new team member, Joel Ellis, and he's somewhat of a Word Ninja.

Ellis joins us, having graduated The University of the South with Magna Cum Laude distinction, and somewhere just below a 4.0 in his major, English (of course).

Since we hired him (Sept. 1) and continuing over the course of the next few months, Ellis will be honing his copy skills (taking AP Style tests, writing nearly 150 articles for WCAR, proofing Web pages for form, style and meaning, and enhancing his SEO knowledge).

Why all the fuss over words?

Our firm recognizes the importance of the written word — maybe more important now than ever before. It's true that our society (the 2008 version) is very visual — we expect images at every turn. But even as images have taken on a greater role in advertising and marketing, the pressure to say the most with the fewest words is intensified.

Hand-in-hand with excellent copywriting goes excellent Search Engine Optimization (seo) markup. And who better to assess the content on your web pages than someone with a very high competency for reading comprehension?

So if you wander by 223 FoNo this fall and happen to see a tall, scholarly looking youngster with manly scruff and editor's glasses, give the guy a pat on the back… in all likelihood, he's looking out for yours!

Google offers easy dictionary check

Julian — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:33:22 +0000

For those wordsmiths out there, I've stumbled on a really cool feature that Google has been using within its main search box.

It's been quite handy when I've wanted to know information related to the definition, or definitions, of a particular word.

Simply type in "define:" followed by the word (or words) you're interested in, and viola! Google delivers a hearty supply of multiple definitions, origins and, often, other languages and their innate definitions.

Check out my screenshot, below, of the search, define:preponderance. Bet you didn't know the military defines it as: "The difference in weight between the breech end of a gun tube, aft of its trunnions, and forward end. Preponderance was important to designer and gunner alike; breechheaviness made the gun sit properly on its carriage and kept it form capsizing when it fired."

define: It works really well when you need a def on the fly, want to know some of the more esoteric meanings of words, when you're just curious about a particular phrase, (or when you're feeling lazy and don't want to pick up the old paper and leather).