Mary Wear on her five copywriting rules

Some (until now) unwritten rules I set myself:

Know when to shut up. The best copywriting isn’t always in the lines. It’s also between them.

Know there’s always a fresh way to tell an old, old story. Stand-up comedians are brilliant at this, taking the most mundane subject - life - and retelling it in ways that make us laugh, wonder and think.

Know your target audience. Not intellectually, but intuitively. Think like them, empathise with them, identify with them. Because at some level, the reader needs to like the writer.

Know that we are all creative creatures. Everyone enjoys the quirks and whimsy of creativity. You don’t have to logic people into a corner, you can charm them into wanting to come out and play.

Clive James said that humour is common sense dancing; following the great advertising tradition of ‘borrowing’ from someone much cleverer, I would say that copywriting is persuasion dancing. So if it doesn’t dance, go back and do it again until it does.

Three sentences explain the picture directly above them. Delete all three.

The category says “save time”. Replace it with the particular irritation: copying the same address into four boxes.

“Busy professionals” becomes “I’m doing this after the kids are asleep”, taken from a customer recording. One phrase names a market segment; the other reveals the hour, fatigue and reason speed matters.

Beside the fourth address field, the draft says, “Yes, again. We’re sorry too.” Keep it for now. Remove the other jokes. A person trying to pay has limited patience for the brand’s sparkling personality.

Read comprehensive integrated capabilities aloud. The phrase survives grammatically and fails to produce any action a buyer can picture. Replace it with the three things the service actually does.

This is Mary Wear’s list used for editing, rather than five slogans pinned above a desk. Silence, freshness, empathy, play and rhythm make different demands at different points. Treating each as a quota would be idiotic.

The shorter page exposes an inconvenient fact: people really do enter the same address four times. “Repeat your address” is harder to ignore than “continue verification”. The revised copy is sent with a note asking why the field exists. If the form is fixed, the only joke disappears from the next version.