Welcome to The Copy Shop!

The Copy Shop is Copywriter Exchange’s monthly blog series written by our community members with the goal of sharing advice and insider tips with like-minded copywriters around the globe. 

This month’s entry is by Steve Howell.

Steve has worked as a freelance writer and editor since retiring from the U.S. Army in 2013. He writes fiction in his free time and lives in Western North Carolina with his wife and two dogs.

Dreyer’s English: the Copywriter’s Indispensable Resource

Since this post is about a book, let’s take a look at the first sentence of Chapter 1: 

“Here’s your first challenge: 
Go a week without writing

• very
• rather
• really
• quite
• in fact”

Good advice, but notice that he begins with a challenge. It won’t be his last, and any reader of this book will be smarter for having read it, whether they’re a writer or not. Also—and I can’t emphasize this enough—if you love language, Dreyer’s English is a fun read. Beginning in the introduction, Dreyer’s method of keeping the reader engaged is classic and effective—he tells stories.

Copywriters use various resources that dictate style, modes of punctuation, and all the peculiarities of whatever system they’re working within. Academics are obligated to work within prescribed systems such as the “Big Three:”

• American Psychological Association (APA) – preferred in the social sciences & medicine
• Modern Language Association (MLA) – generally used in the humanities
• Chicago Manual of Style (CMA) – commonly used in the arts, humanities, history, and particularly among literature students

There are a lot of rules, people. And if you’re working under a constraint to use one of these styles, you’re stuck with mastering them. But what if you’re freestyling—writing an announcement, a blog post for your company’s website, or simply telling an interesting story? Well, then all you have to contend with is one of the world’s most quirky, illogical, and inconsistent systems of communication—the English language.  

When you’re off the leash in the copywriting world, you run the risk, for example, of allowing your own regional dialect to show in idioms, structure, and even spelling. Reader (and editor) reactions to this range from, “I love how your voice is coming through,” to “You ain’t from ‘round here, are you.” Dreyer’s English provides a joyously readable set of recommendations to make writing more effective as well as pleasing to the ear. I often recommend to writers that they read their work aloud before submitting. If it doesn’t sound right spoken aloud, it probably needs work. 

“Copyediting is a knack. It requires a good ear for how language sounds and a good ear for how it manifests itself on the page; it demands an ability to listen to what writers are attempting to do and, hopefully and helpfully, the means to augment it. One can, and certainly should, study the subject, if one is to do this sort of work professionally.” 

—from the introduction to Dreyer’s English

We could use a guide, and that’s where Ben Dreyer steps in. He has given us, as is printed on the cover of Dreyer’s English, “An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.” Besides being a delight to read (You’re bound to laugh out loud at least once.), Dreyer’s awareness of how words work together to form sentences that sound right, makes this guide a lifesaver for copywriters. It’s also a book I’d recommend to anyone struggling to learn English as a second language for the way it clarifies the use of certain commonly botched idioms, counterintuitive spellings, and misunderstood punctuation. 

Although I don’t agree with every detail of the book, it can serve as a safeguard against common hazards threatening even experienced writers. At the same time, it urges writers not to sacrifice creativity for the sake of correctness or convention, a sentiment anyone can appreciate who regularly wrestles with making SEO sound like natural language.

Let’s wrap this up with Dreyer’s final sentence:

“There’s no last word, only the next word.”

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