A Non-Copywriter’s Guide to Effective Writing
Posted July 17th, 2009 / By Laura Averna in Advertising/Marketing, Business, Editing Tips, Freelance Tips, SEO/Web, Tools
In my personal experience as a Marketing Assistant, I had to improve my skills in graphic design, public speaking, project management, planning and negotiation. But when you have to learn something from scratch and you’re not at school anymore, you may end up running into some difficulty.
In those times, whom do you call upon? Google, of course. Google introduced me to all those blogs, guides, tutorials and cheat sheets – any helpful, wonderful and FREE tips. I am grateful for all of those experts-in-their-field sharing their experience and know-how for the sole purpose of contributing to the web community, thus giving a hand to budding professionals like me.
That’s precisely the point. It’s my turn now! Copywriting is what I’m good at (please, don’t contradict me on this point), and I’d love to share some tricks with the non-copywriters out there who need to make up a formal letter, do a PowerPoint presentation or write a product description. Of course you don’t have to become a professional copywriter to do all of these things. I haven’t become a designer just because I watched all of the Photoshop video tutorials available on the Internet. But I did achieve better results thanks to those tutorials, so maybe there’s something I can do to help you write effective, engaging text.
Well, exhaustive enough for an introduction! Let’s start right away with some links you might want to add to your bookmark list:
WordReference
WordReference is my favourite site free translation dictionaries. It might come in handy with idiomatic expressions in foreign language. The Spanish, French and Italian dictionaries and forums are the most popular.
Online Spell Checker
Online Spell Checker is a free and accurate tool for spell-checking in 28 languages.
Advanced Text Analyzer
Get useful statistical information out of your pieces of text such as word/character count, lexical density, readability, word analysis, phrase analysis and graded analysis with Advanced Text Analyzer . It’s free, but it requires registration: Wordcounter is a plug-and-play alternative.
Visuwords
Learn how words associate with Visuwords. This graphical dictionary draws diagrams from the words you look up, highlighting their meanings and the type of relationship with other words and concepts.
Definr
Definr is a nice, suggest-as-you-type English dictionary. You can add it to your Firefox search box for turbo-charging your word search.
Laura Averna is a Copywriter – well, being in charge of Marketing Communications she’s supposed to look after a batch of different tasks, but writing is what she has the most fun with. You might find her raving on Twitter
This is new for me; definitely adding to my bookmarks :) Thank you!
Thank you Laura! Your collection of websites is fantastic. I just checked out Visuwords, and I think I am in love! Great article.
Giselle
Thanks Laura,
Great information. Keep the great tips coming. :-)
EZ
Hi everyone! Thanks for your feedback, I’m glad you liked the links! ^_^
Hi Laura!,
Thank you for the writing tips and links. I look forward to using the Online Spell Checker, the Advanced Text Analyzer, Visuwords, and Definr tools! Please keep doing what you are doing.
I found the link (to this page) today on twitter:
fuelyourwriting New post today —> A Non-Copywriter’s Guide to Effective Writing http://bit.ly/IFesZ
Woo-woo!,
RR
Muchas gracias :)
Wow, I’ve never heard of any of these! Thanks for the awesome bookmarks. :) The Visuwords thing is really interesting and fun to play with.
Great tools for writing, Thank you so much for the list. Your right about reading all the tutorials out there too. Like photography all the tutorials in the world won’t take better pictures for you.
Im new to writing and love tips like this. I would love any help you or the community can offer on writing:
My known issues are:
No experience writing professionally
I write like I converse
Too much to say and my friends keep telling me to write a book… (how?)
I have no idea where to start
For starters I read “On Writing” by Stephen King… any more ideas, tips, please advise.
#Aloha
Copywriting is also a skill that takes years of practice to become very effective in advertising what you are selling and ;:”