Thank you, Mrs B x
You never forget a good teacher.
In my memory, Mrs B is two-thirds Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter and one-part Debbie Harry from Blondie. In reality, she was probably nothing like either. Nostalgia has an automated photoshop function.
She had straight, steel-grey hair, that stopped in a neat line at her shoulders and blue laser eyes - that could chop a cheeky pupil in half at twenty paces – framed by dainty glasses.
Mrs B always wore black polo neck jumpers and rumours abounded, completely unfounded, that she didn’t wear a bra. I don’t know if Mrs B was ever aware of those rumours but I suspect if she was, she wouldn’t have given a monkeys.
One day, during Mrs B’s lesson, a classmate accused another of ‘letting one go’ (as is probably happening right this second in numerous classrooms around the UK). Mrs B said, “Farting is out, OK?”
Of course, the entire room erupted with laughter and then quickly composed themselves as Mrs B continued to glare at us without even cracking a smile. To this day, I still don’t know whether she was being tongue-in-cheek or whether she really did feel, strongly, that farting was indeed ‘out’ (OK?).
But what does all this have to do with copywriting? Well, Mrs B taught us many things but there were two lessons in particular that I thought it might be useful to pass along to anyone wanting to do writing good-er.
1. Drafts should be messy
Before laptops, essays were written in your neatest handwriting. Does anyone else suddenly feel very middle-aged? Mrs B asked us to hand-in our drafts along with our neatly copied out essays. She wanted our drafts to be as messy as possible. It felt very wrong to hand something less than perfect to Mrs B. But this turned out to be excellent training.
I still often draft in long hand. There is a certain freedom and creativity to be found in scribbling out, circling, drawing in margins, swapping sections with clumsily drawn arrows and asterisks. A clean, white electronic page always feels a little clinical to me. Notebooks feel more human. And good copy is human and engaging – no matter the subject-matter. But enough of this hippy-dippy nonsense, the takeaway point here is:
Great copy isn’t instant. The messier your first draft, the harder you’ve been editing, the better the end result.
2. Certain words should be banned
Mrs B was not referring to four-letter words. In fact, as long as they were in context and spelled correctly, she was quite OK about those (did I mention Mrs B was pretty cool?). Mrs B banned the use of words like ‘good’, ‘interesting’, ‘nice’ and ‘boring’.
Something could be ‘repetitive’, ‘tiresome’, ‘irrelevant’ or ‘verbose’ but never ‘boring’. Likewise, you might find something ‘epic’, ‘captivating’, ‘exploratory’ or ‘striking’ but use the word ‘interesting’ and Mrs B would mark you down. She was teaching us to expand our vocabularies, express ourselves better and learn how to use a thesaurus.
As grown-ups, we often get stuck in word-ruts. Perhaps it’s a buzz-phrase that gets used a lot in your organisation or industry, or perhaps it’s a customer service cliché. Clarity remains the aim of the copywriting game – and substituting every other word for a longer word is a terrible idea.
However, taking the time to express something in a more thoughtful or accurate way is usually worth its weight in word-gold.
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Some self-indulgent, nostalgic waffle (feel free to skip this bit and do something else)
Despite not being a natural ‘academic’, after Mrs B’s expert early training, I eventually went on to study Literature at University. When I say, ‘went on to’ what I really mean is that I ‘studied my backside off’ to get onto one of the best Literature courses in the UK. In the late 90s, Leeds’ School of English was on a par with Oxbridge and attracted applicants and professors from all over the world. I studied everything from African to Medieval Lit alongside students who had grown-up reading about the Brontë Sisters, rather than the Sweet Valley High sisters (look, to me they were classics).
On more than one occasion I felt as though I was barely keeping my head above some pretty choppy intellectual waters. But I did the whole ‘studying my backside off’ thing again and came out the other end with a respectable degree and an impressive collection of classic books which sit proudly on my bookshelves to this day.
I would like to say that I display those books because I fell in love with each and every one of them. I guess they partly remind me of my drive and resilience when faced with things that initially appear challenging. But mainly they are there because they make me look clever in the unlikely event that someone who doesn’t know me comes to my house (my beloved vampire and werewolf collections are all upstairs).
If I’m being honest, I’d have to admit that I can’t really remember what’s in a lot of those impressive books. Certainly not with the same timeless clarity that I can remember Mrs B’s lessons ...
For some inexplicable reason, all essays were marked out of twenty and Mrs B (being a hard woman to impress which obviously just made me want to impress her) never gave a score higher than sixteen. It’s been almost 25 years but I distinctly remember the flutter of adrenaline the afternoon she handed me back my neatly written essay which she had given a score of sixteen-and-a-half. I haven’t looked at it since that day but I could tell you exactly what it was about and exactly which bits she liked.
You never forget a good teacher.
Thank you, Mrs B x