These days, we’re mostly too busy copywriting for clients to blog for ourselves. But rather than take down what’s now a 20-year+ archive of posts and newsletters, we’re leaving this final post with highlights from two decades of strongly held opinions about B2B copywriting. Here’s a selection of the most popular posts, plus our own […]
Business copywriting
Copywriting across the spectrum: TOV and why it matters
There’s a copywriter out there whose website features a slider with which visitors can ‘tune’ a paragraph of copy through a spectrum of tones of voice. It’s a brilliant device and we’re extremely jealous of it. Mostly because it’s a great way to show off an important copywriting skill: being able to write in different […]
Our acclaimed copywriting workshop is back!
“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 we’re offering one free Words that Work session to our […]
Why copywriting is a craft, not an art
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 polishing. How does it work in practice? This recent real-life […]
It’s all about me: why B2B customers aren’t listening
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 a “seamless integrated solution”. Your IT supplier would no […]
How tone of voice helps bring in business
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, and we get asked to work with these guides more, […]
Ask Elmore Leonard – and other tips for good copywriting
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 a project. Perhaps the client’s voice […]
Plain Text adds design capability
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 Ian Boyle working on projects for leading B2B agency […]