In a new book called Business Bullshit, trailed in a Guardian Long Read, author André Spicer joins a long tradition of jargon-bashing that stretches back to George Orwell and beyond. As someone whose job is writing stuff for business that’s clear, appealing and easy to understand, my...
"Extremely relevant", "Well delivered", "Definitely recommend", "Relaxed but informative", "Interesting and engaging", "Well structured". These are just a few of the 2016 plaudits for Words that Work, Plain Text's 90-minute copywriting workshop. We enjoy these sessions very much - and it seems our clients do too. So this year, once again...
Obviously, we want you to believe that copywriters are magicians. You send us a brief, we summon the Muse, and persuasive words pour forth. The prosaic truth, however, is that copywriting is a craft, not an art, demanding old-fashioned tools and plenty of hammering and...
One from the archives. It's 14 years now since we wrote a post entitled 'Case study carnage' about what happens when business case studies get mugged by The Suits, i.e. transformed into gibberish by jargon-obsessed managers. There's less of this stuff around now, but still,...
Welcome to Words that work, a writing workshop that packages everything we've learned about B2B copywriting into 90 lively minutes. For a limited period we're offering one free workshop to our clients and contacts. Feel free to share this page or click the image for a PDF...
Draw a cup. What do you see? A stylish item of crockery? A football trophy? Half of a bra? The point of this classic psychology exercise is to show that what one person says can be interpreted by others in many different ways. Now draw...
These days, tone of voice (TOV) is most definitely a thing. Businesses care about how they sound and how they speak, as well as how good they look on the page. We get asked about creating tone of voice guides more than we used to,...
A while back we challenged ourselves to single out one thing we had learned in our time as copywriters. Here are the results so far from four people who write for Plain Text. Paul Connolly, copywriter, journalist, novelist: "Ask Elmore Leonard" Sometimes I run into a wall on...
Clients sometimes ask whether we can provide the pictures as well as the words. Now that we've teamed up with visual communications specialist IDB Creative, Plain Text can provide fully designed promotional materials, from print to video. We first struck up our relationship with IDB's founder...
My brother-in-law, a mechanical engineer, once shared with me a sentence with which his manager portentously opened a meeting: “Before we push the boat out, we’ve got to get into bed with the beast”. I fell about laughing when I heard this. But everyone in...