It was a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, I can’t remember which. It was possibly a Thursday. At some point around mid-afternoon, fresh from describing – in a phrase which resides outside of meaning – a wheelbarrow as being ‘intuitive in its design’, I found myself wondering: is copywriting literature? I noted the question down, thoroughly engaged in the notion of extending this highly unoriginal line of enquiry. It was a title, I fancied, of an article. Defining it as such, I wrote these words. Was this literature? I fancied yes, ceasing to think and beginning to muse. Was I literature? There wouldn’t be time to answer all these questions.
I stopped at that moment writing my copy for a website which sells – in my own words – ‘a wide range of fantastic garden and home supplies’ to half-heartedly pad out my thesis. (I was later to venture far enough to claim: ‘From garden tables to chairs to wheelbarrows and beyond, our online store really has it all!’ Though I wrote these words, they cannot be said to represent my own views.)
The key to much of the copy I write (perhaps craft?) is that I don’t know what I am talking about. This has rarely proved to be a problem. In about two-and-a-half years of producing search engine optimized sentences, only one client has cottoned on to the fact that what had been written in the ‘blog’ section of his fishing-supplies retail website was bollocks—perhaps bollocks, to be generous.
Maybe a word or two is required on the subject of the blog copy task before I go any further. This is a form of writing which quite easily disproves any concepts of language – from Saussurean linguistics through Wittgenstein’s language-game theory to the Derridean notion of free play – which suggests that the significance of words is bound up in how they are read by other humans. What I mean to say here is that these blogs are not read. They are so unread that they are barely even written; they are typed in a seemingly empty forest among falling trees and shitting bears.
No one has ever been about to order a patio table and then stopped to click on the blog section of that website, usually situated within touching distance of the ‘about us’ section, to read a post entitled ‘10 exciting ways to use a garden patio table in the summer’, where nine of the suggestions will be extremely similar to one of the suggestions. These blogs are made up of words whose destination is not the human eye, but the search engine algorithm. The more you update a website, the higher up it will be placed in search results on google. Throw in a generous portion of keywords and you will be up there at the top.
It takes a while to get the hang of it. My initial attempt, now infamous, of typing ‘house plants’ four million times as a means of describing an online store’s range of house plants did not quite hit the mark. One has to be more subtle and offer something like: ‘Here at House Plants UK, we have a vast collection of top quality house plants, so if you are looking for some new house plants, we will be just the right house plants to house plants.’
Back to the fishing equipment website. I know next to nothing about fishing, the bit next to nothing which is actually slightly less than nothing, to be precise. But this for a long time caused no problems, so long as I inhabited the character of someone who seemed to know about this kind of stuff. Indeed, a significant proportion of the job as a copywriter is to do with inhabiting a self-created character perspective. As it happens, little flourishes of nuance here and there aside, there are really only two character perspectives which I play around with.
It turns out that it is best to write either as a cheery moron or a boring expert. The cheery moron will say things like ‘super convenient’ and ‘absolutely adorable’, whereas the boring expert will take every opportunity to whip out the letter and number combos, always directly referencing an ‘HPX5000’ rather than calling it a ‘lawnmower’.
Of course, in its own way, the second voice comes from someone stupidly dull enough to have nothing else to talk about than ‘the precision and clarity afforded by newly developed transducers.’ The first voice, it is soon easy to register, is not cheery at all, but instead adopts the mode of cheeriness as a coded attack on all those who are too stupid to understand how little the paragraphs of product description care about what they purportedly care about.
The first, cheery, voice is, in fact, necessarily more intelligent than the reader. It feels comfortable enough in its superiority not to have to tell you anything about the products which would sound impressively knowledgeable. It focuses on the visual elements, on the wow-factors. The second voice is the real idiot, attempting to hide behind talk of XPT Technology and ‘products boasting a robust deck and self-propelled drive system’, as though such boasting about the knowledge of this will systematically drive their robust deck into self-propulsion. But, of course, that doesn’t make any sense at all. The joke, therefore, is on them.
So you have to do the job of writing in double-pretense either way: you pretend to be the voice of someone pretending to be cheery or pretend to be the voice of someone pretending to be intelligent. It’s really very complicated, see. Perhaps even more complicated than I can understand, and I’m the one making up how complicated it is.
A question, for example, might well arise as to why I have to pretend to be someone who is pretending to be cheerful or clever, rather than simply pretend to be someone who is cheerful or clever. The answer is that, for this medium of discourse to function, I have to be positioned at least at a double-remove from effective and meaningful communication, otherwise the cogs of the mechanism disintegrate. If the system is given a credible foundation, the system (much like the smoke-and-mirrors games of the finance industry) ceases to have a foundation, its foundation being an infinite lack thereof.
There are problems when people actually start reading copy as though it is an earnest attempt to communicate. Thus arose the fishing equipment retail company problem. I say ‘fishing equipment’ when really this is in the fishing world known as ‘tackle’ or ‘gear’, evoking genitals and drugs, respectively. After a year or so of writing articles on their blog which explained what rods are, why it is that choosing the right bait is important, and what are the best types of rod and bait, I was tasked with writing a blog post about something which I now cannot remember, but which I suggest might have been in the realms of: ‘what’s the best fishing to do in the spring when you are fishing’ or ‘here is a list of fishing.’
Anyway, head honcho at this top UK fishing retail site, a man who for the purposes of truth we shall call Barry Fish Bones Fisherman the Fish (a man whom I later found out was an actual river), noticed that I had fucked my nomenclature. I used phrases which were only common in and amongst US fishmen. (Juste par exemple: ‘Trash can’ instead of ‘watery bits’; ‘dipshit’ instead of ‘dipstick’).
Barry came down on me like a sack of shit. He returned an overabundantly worded critical reading of my prose work which submitted the thesis that there was something rather fishy afoot, and not just the fishiness of his own feet. He claimed that the author of this blog post must not have known anything about fishing, that the author must have put together a blog by copying a US based fishing blog, that the author might not even be the fish he claims in his writing to be.
But, you see, this was an argument which, with reference to two points, I could swiftly disregard. The first point, quite simply, was that I had been writing copy for over a year for this website without having had any experience rodding fish – lakeside or sea style – and they had only just noticed the hint of inaccuracy in my blog-creation. Could any of this matter at all if I had written every word for your website for a year without you realizing I was not a fish-whisperer?? Quad Erat Demonstratus, mate.
My second point is that I had once been given a task for this website to rework a product description of something called a ‘Chod Rig Bag’ which read: ‘It is only this purpose built tackle pouch which will be perfect for keeping your chod rig essentials, as well as a number of tied rigs on the foam spool, whilst it fits easily into tuned carryalls and is stackable with numerous other tuned accessory bags.’
Big Barry Fish could not come back to me to argue about such questions of appropriate knowledge when I was being offered this high modernist depiction of a psyche in disintegration, and still being expected to believe that fishing was some kind of sensible hobby in which words still had meaning. I mean, the sheer scrot of the man.
I should probably return to the wheelbarrow now. Not only does my analysis run dry, but I also find myself compromising my own position. To protect against this in advance, and this is something which I find almost impossible to grasp, these words have not been written by myself. I am not Puddleduck Ashworth. I have been careful to obscure my identity, so dangerous would it be for a copywriter – traditionally bound by the Official Secrets Act to remain apolitical – to speak of such matters openly. As such, I have adopted another name and, furthermore, I have hacked Search Engine Optimization algorithm tools to determine precisely the words I would have to transmit in the medium of a TN2 article so that I can be certain this collection of words, on entry to the internet realm, has exactly 0% chance of being read or shared.
If this appears not to have eventualised, I would have to tentatively point the finger at the Kremlin.
The piece of software which I put together sorted out the words that you now read. None of this is written by Puddleduck Ashworth, who is in any case not me. The algorithm wrote these words here. And this. And also this. And this too. (Is this literature?) And this. (Is this copy?) And this. (And this.)
By Puddleduck Ashworth
