The Technology of Text

The Technology of Text

     Back when history began, writing was a secret for a small inner circle of kings and priests and tax collectors. Then a sudden technological advance let ordinary people convert text into audible speech.

     It was 2,700 years ago, and Greece was just another grubby little kingdom until King Cadmus imported the Phoenician alphabet. In an accident of fate, Phoenician used five more letters than the Greeks needed for their language. Like Arabic today, their ancient writing did not include vowels. Cadmus made the huge technological advance of using those extra letters as vowels.

PCLPTC MNNGLSSNSS

     The alphabet became a killer app that converted text into speech. Text became easy to read. Instead of an unending stream of acronyms, text became a flowing transcription of human speech that anybody could decode simply by speaking it aloud. PCLPTC MNNGLSSNSS was easy enough to read if you were already one of the cool kids, but with vowels inserted, suddenly everybody could see if they were merely apocalyptic meaninglessnesses.

     Instead of its former role as a means of secret communications within a cabal, writing became a massive new channel of sharing.

     The Iliad and the Odyssey were oral tales told around the campfire for a thousand years, memorized and handed down from generation to generation. Homer wrote them down in the years after King Cadmus’s innovation.

     When information became easy to share, the accumulation of knowledge turned asymptotic. Within a few generations Greece became the foundation of Western thought and literature. Socrates worried that making literacy easily available to all would result in the destruction of human powers of memory. He was right. Why bother to memorize the ILIAD when you can just look up any passage in a hard-copy print version? Write-once, read-many.

     But the tradeoff was clear: text wasn’t just memory storage; it was a launchpad for new ideas. From vowel insertions to spaces between words, punctuation, and the printing press, writing evolved into one of humanity’s most powerful technologies. The new alphabet turned writing into a medium for storytelling rather than just for regal edicts and tax regulations and inventories and bookkeeping. 

     Today, corporate culture is abandoning the technology of text. Text is a technology that requires an operator. Unlike the passive acceptance of audio and video, a reader must actively extract the thought and meaning in the words.

“Typography bears much resemblance to cinema, just as the reading of print puts the reader in the role of movie projector.”

      –Marshall McLuhan, THE GUTENBERG GALAXY

     Business sites are reverting text to the role of protective camouflage, a deflective shield of minimum compliance and disingenuous cover stories buried under a cascade of trendy buzzwords. Text seems old and outdated, it can’t compete against YouTube and TikTok and Instagram.

     Amid the worldwide media glut, companies have given up caring whether people read their website text: their goal is merely to plunk the text into your view-space. With the right magic SEO dust inserted into the text, the robots will deliver your text directly to your most highly qualified leads. But will they read it while feeling as though they are wading through tar?

     And if that isn’t enough to prevent the sharing of their information, companies present it in ways that visually block the message. Here’s a landing page for some kind of internet-of-things company. The search bots can read it easily. How about you?

     If you battle your way through this illegible text, you learn–nothing. The sentence is an assemblage of vague abstractions. It can only leave readers impatient and irritated at having wasted their time.

     The first goal of effective text should be to reward the reader’s time. Text is a technology that can make information clear, engaging, and effective.

     Language is humanity’s superpower. It’s about the will to share. Good writing embodies this principle. It reveals. It connects. It makes knowledge accessible and ideas contagious. In a world drowning in dull, evasive text, the challenge is clear: let’s make our words count.

Copywritering 9-16-24

I was a copywriter for a long time and then the Macintosh computer came along and changed the entire graphic arts industry. Typesetters were among the first to vanish. A prominent Santa Barbara typesetter suicided.

I myself profited by draining the life out of typesetters using my laser printer. When I bought my first laser printer it was a huge purchase, $4,500 in 1987 dollars ($12,500 in 2024 dollars), and it would not work with my existing computer so I also had to buy a new computer and all-new software.

I learned all the new graphics applications that came along for the Macintosh and moved to San Francisco and brought my copywriter’s eye to the graphic production field and found work with dozens and dozens of companies through MacTemps as a Photoshop/Illustrator/ Quark guy.

     That was in The Days of Print. I phased into the web in 1999 when I told MacTemps I wanted more writing work instead of Photoshop work, and soon I was writing online product descriptions for the Internet Shopping Network. It was the dot-com boom era and Silicon Valley flourished. I bought gold coins as investments. I still have the turbo Saab I bought.

 

Copywritering 8-10-24

Copywritering 8-10-24

   I’ve been copywritering for a long time. I read all the books about copywriting and read the biographies of the great copywriters and I applied their best practices in everything I wrote as a freelancer.

     So when I landed a job at BBDO Detroit I thought I would encounter a crew of similar adherents to the foundations of good advertising. 

     Instead I found a creative staff that had other things on their mind instead of the daily drudgery of producing what Chrysler Corporation wanted to say about Dodge Trucks. I wrote print, radio, and TV commercials as if they mattered and I was crestfallen to find out that the others on the staff had no pride of authorship. They cranked out the crap and tried not to think about it.

     I spent my first six weeks on the job studying everything the agency had produced in the past year and was stunned by its violation of sound copywriting principles. I kept thinking I would gasp and wake up to find it was a dream.

     Eventually I figured out what the ad agency wanted from me. Good copywriting wasn’t what they wanted.

     Okay, I shrugged and gave ’em what they wanted. Over the next calendar year I wrote more ads than anybody else in the agency. If there was a project that needed actual, you know, writing, they called me in.

        One day I was typing away, reasoning myself through an assignment by writing about it to consider all aspects, when the senior art director said, “It’s amazing how you can just sit down and write.”

       Startled the hell out of me as I didn’t know he’d been standing behind me.

     None of the other writers wrote very much. They were surprised to find out that when I went home at night, I sat down at the typewriter and wrote stories and magazine articles. They were eager to set aside all aspects of work when they got home each day.    

     They were puzzled as to why I would use my first big paycheck to buy an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter. Don’t you already have an IBM at the office? Yeah, but I need one at home, too.

     I kept writing about how the agency was going to lose the account if they kept up their anti-copywritering ways.

      A new CEO took over at Chrysler and he visited the agency and had a meeting with the top Creatives (not me, I was the junior writer back in those days). He pointed at one writer and said, “You–what’s a McPherson strut?” I could have answered that one.

     That writer was irate about it. He told me, “I’m an artist, not a mechanic.”

     When the agency got fired I was contacted by several other Detroit ad agency recruiters but I knew that they were all essentially identical to BBDO. Instead I fled back to California to resume freelancing, which I have done ever since.

Copywritering 8-8-24

Copywritering 8-8-24

How can a freelance copywriter fit into the workflow these days. 

I recently looked at the websites of hundreds of web design shops from Silicon Valley to San Diego, and although they are all staffed with the world’s best coders and graphic designers, hardly any of them list a copywriter on their team. Copywriters are no longer in the picture.

In the Before Time I wrote content as a freelance copywriter and creative director. My clients were advertising agencies and graphic design shops, which by today have morphed together into web design shops that don’t need copywriters.

So, who’s writing the content?  I’m looking for advice as to how a freelance copywriter can fit into the workflow these days. 

The designers tell me that they use whatever text the client supplies. Web designers have abdicated the responsibility for the communication of facts about the client.

When I look at the sites they produce for industrial and technical clients, I see that the graphics are fabulous, but the sites suffer from the common flaws of client-written copy.  

One of which is the underlying assumption that nobody reads this stuff anyway, so why bother putting any effort into the presentation of facts about the company.

As a copywriter, my goal is to respect the visitor’s time: condense the information into a succinct summation, and make sure it’s worth the reader’s time to actually read the stuff. My first duty is to the reader.

Copywritering 8-7-24

Copywritering: August 7, 2024  

“Copywritering” is the process of attempting to earn a living by being a  copywriter.

      I’ve been doing it a long time. I never expected to retire: I thought I would work until my final breath. I’m not in retirement, I’m still trying to adapt my skills toward being a useful participant in the world of website-building.

     I haven’t been able to attract any attention from the local website community. If such a thing even exists. I’ve met and/or interacted with hundreds of webshop owners from San Francisco to San Diego and none of them have been interested in offering improved copy to their clients.

     My old thing used to be: brochures. A brochure was a substantial expense for a small company. Usually I was brought into the picture only after the company had already been sold on the idea of spending the money.

     Okay, what is going into the brochure? It was my job to interview people in the company and investigate what the competitors were publishing and find out what the market circumstances were, and then present a rough draft that was wrong in every aspect but at least it gave the division managers a starting place and of course each division manager wanted his division to be first.

     Usually the final version morphed back toward my initial presentation as executives slowly realized that my structure was pretty darned good, now that they’ve actually looked at it.

 
 
 

Copywritering 8-6-24

Copywritering 8-6-24
    I saw an article today, “Big Tech’s AI shock troops came for us — are you next?” by Josh Slocum. He was laid off as a content creation writer when the company he worked for went out of business last week and all thirty writers are now in the unemployment line.

“It’s not as if we hadn’t seen it coming. The immediate benefits of automating are all too clear, especially if a company is struggling. “AI is cheap, accessible, and easy,” Jack tells me. “[Even if] it’s not necessarily good.”
https://tinyurl.com/y4k4fuzp

     It’s a new universe of an infinite number of venues. Pick a niche and there’s an existing support structure for it already monetized.

     I’m mired in the adbiz of old. Step 1, catch attention. Step 2, transfer information. Step 3, make offer. Most shops concentrated too much on Step 1.

     I was the guy at the Step 2 and Step 3 desk.