How to write like an expert and be like a topper
How to write like an expert and be like a topper
How to write like an expert and be like a topper
When you are a copywriter. Writing words, and using formats, that virtually every single recipient will immediately react with indifference, apathy or downright hostility. So your aim is to change the way they think, feel and act. You are asking them,usually, to spend money.If that weren’t a tough enough challenge, it gets worse.
Because most of us have been taught to write the wrong way.All through further and higher education, and into our professional lives, our instructors, tutors, mentors and
managers have insisted we stick to the facts. Nothing persuades better than the relentless piling up of evidence. Make the logical case with enough force and your reader is powerless to do anything other than compliance.Yet even the most fleeting consideration of our efforts to date would suggest that this approach is way off beam. I have always felt that emotions and feelings play an important part in the way people make decisions. Over the years, I have had my suspicions confirmed by, variously, economists, scientists . So I wanted to investigate further to understand not just what happens butWhy does it happen?
Decision-making, motivation and Emotion
It feels natural to attribute our decision making ability to rationality. After all, humans are the most highly evolved form of life on Earth and have developed the greatest capacity for reason and logical thought. Our lives are awash with data –
So surely we construct a mental pro/con chart using that information before we decide to do something? Well, yes. After a fashion. Our decisions are in fact powered by our motivations, which themselves are a blend of cognitive and emotional components. We may well have
weighed up the pros and cons of a particular gym, but our motivation is underpinned by unhappiness with our physical body. Or a desire to get fit because we are frightened of having a heart attack. Consumer copywriters (often but not exclusively working in advertising agencies) have long known about and played on the
power of motivation.
The best copywriters have always combined rational and emotional arguments. Most do it intuitively. Neuroscientists have offered reassuring evidence that it’s a sound approach. For example, if your reader engages with your copy emotionally, as well as rationally, they will spend longer reading, and also remember more of it. It’s a powerful approach to persuasion. And the roots of its power are twined deeply into the anatomical structure of our own brains.