Your Custom Text Here
San Diego freelance copywriter Anne McColl shares tips and insights on copywriting, running a small business, marketing trends, writing websites, and design.
Hacienda is the place where Sinatra, John Wayne and Raquel Welch hung out back in the day when Cabo San Lucas was a sleepy fishing town. Times have changed but Hacienda is still the place in Cabo, just steps from the marina and downtown. (And speaking of Cabo Wabo, Sammy Hagar made 200 million licsensing his booze brand!)
Visit the site here.
See the brochure: Steps
Word Girl Wednesday is a new addition to my blog where I’ll be sharing some tricks of the trade.
How do you find just the perfect word? Or is it the precise word. Or exact word.
The easiest way of course is to use the Thesaurus feature under Tools menu. The turn out for the perfect looks something like this:
It's quick. It's easy. And it's predictable.
One of my favorite resources is Visual Thesaurus. It’s is an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. In other words, it’s a dictionary for people who think visually. Type in a word, click on an answer and dive into more possibilities.
(Courtesy of wearethedigitalkids.com)
No, I'm not at BlogWorld. No, I'm not even at Not at BlogWorld in SD hosted by @interactivem and @downtownrob. (That would be #bwe10sd.)
But some of my favorite blogs right now:
MOTY Notes: Stories of Imperfection
Great tales of motherhood and life by Kathryn Proulx, wife of Lemonade the Movie creator Erik Proulx. Kathryn has a wicked sense of humor. (I dig Erik's blog Please Feed the Animals too.)
Insights by Amanda Mooney, a digital kid and account supervisor for the strategy team at Edelman Digital. (I also like how the photos in her masthead always change.)
I'm so insanely jealous of designers who can write.
I've made a career as an advertising and interactive copywriter (or digital copywriter or web writer or whatever else ya wanna call it) for a host of clients including Hawaiian resorts, fish tacos and shoes. This was some of the most challenging copy I've ever written – The Law Office of Warner & Szakall. The subject matter - child advocacy – is a serious issue. The fate of children's lives and futures are at stake here. The goal here was to be conversational, reassuring and non-intimidating.
Boy wonder Joey Pfeifer was the designer (and now with Happy Cog OMG!) Joey had the great idea of making this site a one pager to make it more accessible.
See the site here.
These are some great handmade birdhouses made by Jeff Canham (one of my favorites) and Luke Bartels, as part of their "For the Birds" show at the Curiosity Shoppe.
Back in the day, curate was a word with crusty and musty associations.
Originally, a curate was a dude in a long block cloak who was an assistant to a pastor or rector at an Episcopal parish.
And there were art curators at museums, who if they really wanted job security had English accents and Ph.D.s in Art History. At the zoo, there were the Reptile Curators, Mammal Curators and Marine Life Curator. (They all had Ph.D.s too.)
But recently, the word curate has become, dare I suggest it, cool. Design blogs are curated. Art/music/culture events are curated. And even the merchandise in fashionable boutiques is curated.
Thank goodness, because we need curators more than ever.
Just think how much bombards you everyday on the Internet. You could spend hours wading through all the crap to find the rare things that that inspire and make you say, “Damn, that’s good.” The home page for Brain Pickings says it takes almost 200 hours a month to edit and compile content for that amazing site. And just like the curator back at the museum, who selects are pieces to be seen as a collection, a digital curator selects items than may change in meaning when juxtaposed against other items. So really, the act of editing, has become an art form in itself: the art of curating.
Something that took far too long to do.
Today the most venerated AP Style Guide changed the official spelling of Web site to website. Good news for interactive copywriters, digital copywriters, web writers or whatever you call em.
It's about time.
I've been working on revamping my portfolio site for quite some time with designer/illustrator Matt Luckey. The entire design process as been about stripping away the extra, giving emphasis to the work. Which brings me to a site where a copywriter literally stripped. May I present Lawson Clarke, otherwise known as MaleCopywriter.com. His site, as well as his work is hilarious.
Of course, Lawson's site is even funnier when you realize his inspiration – Burt Reynolds circa 1972.
Lawson appears in Erik Proulx's Lemonade, a film about advertising professionals reinventing themselves. He also appeared as the original Straight Guy in the pilot for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. For not always quite work-appropriate commentary, follow him @malecopywriter.
So if a picture is worth a thousand words, that's a pretty damn good blog post.
Here's the challenge suggested by Shelly Bowen, one of my favorite people and content strategist extraordinaire: Take a shot. Every day.
It can be low-tech. (Hello iPhone!)
But the idea is to take the time to notice the small details, an interesting pattery or a new viewpoint.
Because the more I work as an interactive copywriter, the more important the visual has become.
Follow along here.
On Fridays, theHIVE hosts Friday Morning Brew, a time to get to know fellow HIVE mates better. Recently, Lauren Walsh of Citrus PR and I were talking how our writing has changed in the interactive realm and how our approaches were different coming from PR and copywriter backgrounds.. That lead to us working together on a blog post for SoCalPRBlog.com entitled "Pitching in an ADD-Friendly World.
You can read it here.
NoReply@Zazzle sends me an email with the message "We've missed you."
Do they expect me to open an email from NoReply@Zazzle.com? Perhaps I would be more likely to open an email from YourFriends@Zazzle or DesignFun@Zazzle or even CustomerService@Zazzle.
Every word matters!
Every once in a while, I have to go back and review how things are spelled.
Internet – The omnipresent wonder invented by Al Gore gets a capital I.
Intranet – No capital.
Web page – Another capital letter. It’s two words.
home page – Two words.
email – No hyphen. Yes, it used to have a hyphen but it was dropped.
e-business, e-commerce, etc. – These have hyphens. Go figure.
But in general, the rule of thumb is consistency. If you want to spell webpage as two words go ahead. Just be consistent.
Recently, my six-year old daughter was looking over my shoulder as I was writing some ad copy.
She then said, “Hey Mom, you can’t start a sentence with and.”
“Well, Gina,” I said, rather at a loss for words, wondering how does she know this, “I’m writing Web copy. It’s okay to break the rules.”
My apologies to Gina’s first-grade teacher Mrs. Willis, I am one of those responsible for the decline of the English language. But as a copywriter, I’m not writing to please English teachers, I’m writing to strike an emotional chord with consumers in a hope to reach their wallets.
Occasionally, when a client reviews Web copy, they may question grammar usage. While overly formal, grammatically perfect copy may be a put off, overly casual language may look unprofessional. The idea is to find an appropriate balance.
In short, what’s the golden rule to remember? Consider your audience. When your audience is insurance brokers, the tone will be more formal than when hawking fish tacos.
Grammar rules that are okay to break:
1. Starting a sentence with “And” or “But”: Yes, it’s perfectly acceptable to start with conjunctions. Just remember that it is slightly more informal.
2. Contractions: Don’t. Aren’t. Isn’t. They’re all okay.
3. Sentence fragments: When you write like you speak, it’s okay to use sentence fragments for drama or emphasis. Really.
4. Slang: Go ahead and use slang, just be sure not to overdo it. Web copy for Jump Mobile, a pre-paid wireless service designed for mobile-dependent, urban youth, is informal yet very light on urban euphemisms. Nothing is worse than a client trying to appeal to a target market and looking like a poser instead.
5. One-sentence or one-word paragraphs: This is particularly applicable to writing for the Web. Readers are typically skimming a Web page looking for a particular piece of information. Huge blocks of text can be visually intimidating and chances are, your reader will go click, click, good-bye.
So there you go. Write. Relate. Have fun. Get results.