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Every year, we run a series of inter­nal train­ing ses­sions called the Ban­ner Acad­e­mies. These are to help us share insights and infor­ma­tion across the com­pany. But, we fig­ured, why stop there?

So below is the pre­sen­ta­tion I gave yes­ter­day on writ­ing. It’s designed to be a prac­ti­cal col­lec­tion of tips and tricks – basi­cally, use­ful stuff I’ve learnt over the years from peo­ple far clev­erer than I.

The fast and dirty writ­ing academy

Should you wish, you can down­load a PDF of the pre­sen­ta­tion here and get the notes (which will make the most sense of it all) here.

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I’m get­ting ready to run one of our in-house train­ing ses­sions (Ban­ner Acad­e­mies). This time it’s devoted to offer­ing tips, tricks and tech­niques to help our peo­ple write better.

Regard­less of what you do in mar­ket­ing, the writ­ten word is pretty fun­da­men­tal to how effec­tive you’ll be – whether with peers, cus­tomers or part­ners. And, if you write in Eng­lish, you’ve got plenty of words to choose from.

Give or take a few thou­sand, there are about 170,000 words in active use on a daily basis. Not bad when you con­sider that the vast major­ity stem from a palette of just 26 let­ters.

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If many in our indus­try are to be believed, copy is some­what of a optional extra when it comes to mar­coms. Or maybe a nec­es­sary evil. To be tol­er­ated as long as it doesn’t exceed 30 words or so. Of course you see this most in adver­tis­ing which has become increas­ingly image-led over the years. Direct mail still resists, bol­stered by the moun­tains of evi­dence that copy dri­ves response. And then there’s web.

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