After A While, Your Material Will Transmute Into The Concise And Precise...

After a while, your material will transmute into the concise and precise, highly-polished style of the professional. Eventually, you'll be able to omit the intermediate stage altogether; and your first attempt, plus a polish, will be sufficient for each job.

But as I've implied, practice along with total application is the only road to travel. Developing a style doesn't happen overnight; arriving at a point where people recognize your work by style alone - and not because they know which accounts you handle - takes working at.

Lonely, frustrating work at that. I digress. So now, the mechanics of copy and some techniques for putting it together - stage by stage. In the following exercise, my interjections between the actual copy elements are not part of a magic formula. They are there as guidelines only.

As the hub for this exercise, we'll contrive the launch of a new estate-car called the Viking GL. Its selling points, in order of importance, are: 1 Measurably, a larger interior capacity than any other estate vehicle on the market. We shall make it three cubic feet larger. 2 The fuel consumption is comparable with that of a small car: 45 m.p.g. 3 When compared to other cars of its size and class, the Viking works out at average cost - say, £5000. Some car.

I am suggesting that a headline has already been written for this project. For better or worse, it says: LOAD HOG! Hopefully, the queue speaks for itself; but whatever your reservations, it does us the undoubted service of telling the big-capacity story fairly crisply. How original it is, I don't know.

What's more, I think the exclamation mark is well justified in this case. All right, the first step is to establish the name of the vehicle - to make certain everyone knows what we're talking about: Introducing the new Viking GL. The load hog. Followed by a brief description: A cleverly designed estate-car that's bigger on space.

Easier on petrol. And a reinforcement of its major USP: In fact, the Viking GL gives you more interior space than any other estate currently on the market. A fill three cubic feet more.