Socrates was a copywriter

I spend a lot of my writing time simply thinking, and that means thinking about what I as a copywriter do for people. It's easy to reduce copywriting to a string of words that prompts people to move, act, respond, and sometimes buy a product or service.  

Which is unfortunate. I'm coming to believe that copywriting is much more than that.  

Photo by Juri Gianfrancesco on Unsplash

My belief that copy is more was encouraged recently when I was engaged in conversation with a client about how a midlife illness provided an opportunity to find a more sustainable version of herself. Her previous attempts to navigate relationships, careers, and shifting locations found her putting forward selves that lacked the capacity to say what she wanted, needed, or could endure. The fracturing of herself broke her until she fought back heroically to find help in a life coach. The coach's greatest contribution was introducing a more sustainable and resilient self to this woman that had always been present but nevertheless silenced. Giving this new self a voice was liberating. 

My role as a writer really was to take an early draft of her thoughts and reflect them back to her much like an echo: "You said this. Is that what you meant?" It allowed her to then respond back to me: "Yes, I did," or "No, I meant this other thing."  

"Oh, you meant this?" 

"Yes."

 And (sometimes), "No, you're not hearing me."

 Back to the editing.

 It's a back-and-forth winnowing of thought to separate the chaff from the wheat. You could say that the collaborative nature of our exchange was the same process as standing before a mirror to adjust cosmetically what is seen to be something that we would rather see and have others see, too. The result was a presentation: here's what we devised as the best articulation of what we want to say and project. She was pleased. I was pleased. We both had a clearer understanding of how we made thoughts clearer to each other, ourselves, and others. 

It was beautiful.

Photo by Juri Gianfrancesco on Unsplash

Plato's dialogues are full of such exchanges, just as our days are. I mean, whose thought does Socrates not refine?

Conversation allows the call and response of statement and question, speaker and audience. It's sacred. Almost religious. But the goal in all is clarity of thought. It is a tragedy to see words used flimsily, that the very threads of our relational tapestries are stepped on and abused. At times, broken. We wonder why they unravel. Copywriting is an opportunity to clarify thought both for the client who I'm writing for and the customer whom I'm writing to. In this sense copywriting forms a bond between people in need of each other: the customer needs the service, and the service-giver—i.e., business owner—needs the customer.  

The give and the take. Copy glues the two together. 

Someone could argue that I'm taking too romantic a view of what copywriting is. Perhaps so. But none the more romantic than someone who says sex is way more than what porn makes it out to be. I believe in the power of authentic and interfacing bonds of human connection to create meaningful exchanges among people that then go on to form societies, nations, continents, and the globe. We are held together or ripped apart by these exchanges. Wars erupt from them, and marriages grow from them.  

From all the above, I've come to this conclusion: copy has the power to reinforce or demolish those authentic and interfacing bonds and foster humanity and love or their opposites.