Copywriting Is The Fine Art Of Encouraging The Imagination

by Bonnie Boots

If you struggle to write your own copy, whether for sales pages, blogs or articles, here's something you should know. Copywriting, at it's most basic level, is the fine art of encouraging the imagination of the reader.

And lucky for you--the imagination is very easily encouraged!

Here's an example. In an interview I recently gave to an online magazine, I mentioned a system I use to organize my promotional activities. One of the readers that left a comment said, "I'm afraid I could never be as organized as Bonnie Boots."

When I read that, I howled!

One little comment I'd made about my "system" had been enough to build a picture in that reader's mind (and probably many others) of myself as a paragon of organization, every hair in place, every i dotted and t crossed.

My life, of course, is far from picture-book perfect. I live in the midst of overflowing file cabinets, bookshelves filled to bursting, and on every flat surface, notebooks, magazines, newspaper clippings and even more books, books, books.

It's precisely because I am so unorganized that I strive to maintain what systems I do have. I'm well aware that a few simple tools (like my color-coded to-do list and my calendar for promotional activities) are the only things that keep me from falling into complete chaos.

Of course, I couldn't say all that in a brief interview. All I could say is that I keep a calendar that helps me stay on track. And the reader's imagination took it from there.

That illustrates a phenomena every professional copywriter knows and uses.

When human beings hear or read information, our brain makes sense of what is being said by making up pictures to illustrate the text. If we hear or read the word "school bus," our imagination will show us a picture of a yellow bus. That's how the brain helps itself understand information.

In most people, the pictures generated by the imagination are quite grand.

For example, if someone is describing their summer cabin in the woods, and no photograph is available, your imagination is likely to conjure up a picture of a magnificent log home right out of the pages of Architectural Digest.

If someone is describing their girlfriend and no photo is available, you're likely to imagine someone that looks like a fashion model. That's just human nature.

I remember a time a woman I'd just met was describing the aviary she'd had built alongside her home.

She told me it had cement floors for easy cleaning, and a timer-controlled shower system so the flock of exotic birds could be bathed every day. She told me each pair of birds had a custom-built cage complete with nest box so they had the best possible environment for her breeding program.

And she told me how much she enjoyed stepping out of her kitchen and into the aviary every morning, to sip a cup of coffee while she watched her lovely parrots play and preen. "It's my little oasis away from the world," she sighed.

In my imagination, I saw a splendid private zoo lacking nothing but a gift shop. Oh, how I envied that lucky animal owner!

Imagine my shock when I was invited for a visit and found…not the mini-zoo of my imaginings, but a tiny house, barely as big as a one-car garage, and alongside it, an aviary built of two-by-fours and wire screening over what had once been the crumbling concrete driveway.

An amazing number of highly valuable exotic birds were crammed chock-a-block into the space, housed in cobbled-together cages made of something like heavy-gauge chicken wire.

The timer-controlled sprinkler system was not an elegant overhead arrangement of stainless steel tubes and misting heads, but a patched-up garden hose draped over a support beam and connected to a lawn sprinkler. A timer plugged in to an alarmingly overloaded wall circuit controlled it.

The place was entirely dismal; damp, dark and crawling with so many cockroaches that it looked like a scene from a horror movie. (This was outdoors in Florida, after all. Our state bird is the cockroach.)

The woman who told me about her aviary wasn't trying to mislead me. She used no adjectives or exaggerations in describing her place. Every word she'd spoken was true.

 An aviary is any structure built to house birds, and there was, indeed an aviary built alongside the house. Only my imagination had made it a grand zoo-like structure.

There was, as described, a timer-controlled sprinkler system to bath the birds each day. Only my imagination had made it of stainless steel tubing and multiple misting heads.

The cages were, in fact, custom-built --by a neighborhood handyman using supplies from a feed store. Only my imagination had made them into the kind of elegant, welded-steel cages you see in zoos.

If you think back, you'll remember times in your own life where your imagination turned what you read or heard into something much grander than it proved to be.

That dinner you ordered in the fancy restaurant wasn't quite the culinary triumph you'd pictured. Or that house in the real estate listings was rather less than you'd imagined.

All copywriters know that the human imagination tends to "gild the lily," picturing every humble thing as grand and glorious. Skilled copywriters, without stepping over the line into lying, use language that encourages readers down the path to exaggerated imaginings. That's how sales are made.

You may not be a skilled copywriter, but you must nonetheless create all sorts of written material, from blog posts to articles to business brochures. If you haven't mastered the fine art of leading with language, then do the opposite. Provide a few facts, and let your reader's imagination fill in the blanks.

Notice I didn't say, "Provide all the facts." There's not enough room even on the longest web page for all the facts. No one would stick around to read that epic.

We all edit the facts and details every time we write or speak. When you're writing to influence an audience, on a sales page, for instance, edit your story down to the details your visitors really want to know.

What do they want to know? Benefits and features. What's in it for them.

Tell your readers the features of your product or business. Tell them how they will benefit from those features. Tell them what's in it for them.

You don't have to struggle to "write fancy." Instead, write simple. Tell just enough, and know that your reader's imagination will fill in the blanks with pictures more wonderful than your words could ever paint.
 


 

 
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