Copywriting tends to come in one of two forms – short copy or long copy. Personally, I prefer short, snappy and to the point to the ‘American’ style copy that goes on and on and on. I tend to switch off whenever I see it, but it obviously works for some people.

But to be an expert freelance copywriter you have to learn when it is appropriate to be short and snappy and when the project calls for longer copy.

If your brief calls for short and snappy you have to be ruthless and cut your copy to the bone. There is no room for creative flair – your copy must be concise and to the point.

Quite often long copy is called for when writing for the direct mail market – believe it or not, people to actually read those long press ads that you see and those multi-page sales letters.

One famous example of long copy in press advertising was an ad for Merrill Lynch. It took up a whole page in the New York Times – seven columns, tiny type, no pictures and a total of 6,540 words! Guess what? It drew in 10,000 requests for a booklet mentioned towards the end of the ad.

What can we learn from this? Well, in short, what matters the most is how interesting your copy is to the reader NOT its length. No matter how long your copy, if it isn’t interesting no one is going to read it. And if no one reads it, it isn’t going to sell. And if it doesn’t sell, your client will go out and find a new copywriter.

There is one golden rule to remember though when writing long copy (and short for that matter) – always plan, plan, plan. If you don’t you will turn off your reader and they will be lost forever.

The author, Sally Ormond (Briar Copywriting), is a freelance copywriter who specialises in website copywriting

Tags: copywriter, Copywriting, freelance copywriter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under Business, Copywriting, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.