If you’re building, running or marketing a business, at some point you’ll need to speak to a copywriter for some advice.

Why? Because despite some people having this preconception about us being complete geeks who prefer book characters to real people (actually, in my case this is probably true), copywriters are some of the nicest and most helpful people you can talk to.

It took me a while to believe that they’re all so lovely, because as a freelancer, every copywriter I meet in real life or encounter online is potential competition, and we all have to make a living.

This could be a little worrying when I look at my LinkedIn contacts list and see that copywriters make up a very significant percentage of the people I’m connected with. These people are surely seeing my stuff, stealing my amazing ideas (hmmm), and jumping in on the interactions I’m having with potential clients. Why the hell would I surround myself with them?

It’s true that, as with any business – or with any creative field – we all take inspiration and ideas from what our peers are producing and the ways in which they’re working, but copywriters in particular are a very secure bunch. We know that the majority of would-be clients are (rightly) choosing their copywriters based on something more than just price points, locality or Google searches. Clients serious about getting their copy right (ooh, clever) are choosing their copywriters based on the interactions they have with them and the relationships they subsequently build – online, on the phone or over a coffee (not in my case, obviously) – whereby they get an idea of whether or not the copywriter in question will be a good fit for their brand, understands their product or service well, and just has something about them that makes the client think, “You know what, they just ‘get’ this”. 

Secure in this knowledge, we copywriters champion each other’s posts and projects. We support each other’s ideas and interactions. We even put each other forward for referrals on projects we know are well out of our comfort zones. In doing all of this, we’re reminding the world of business that, as a group, we’ve got some good stuff to say – and you should take what we can do seriously in your brand building and marketing strategy.

I appreciate this doesn’t directly answer the question I posed in the title of this piece, but as I started writing this, I realised that copywriters just have so much going for them as great people, and I wanted to share it, so that anyone out there who just shoves us in the ‘grammar nazi’ box can start to take us a little more seriously.

So, why are copywriters always so happy to give you free advice, then? There are several reasons.

Firstly, we are delighted when people take an interest in the importance of good copy, having faced countless experiences of businesses who spend thousands on a logo, brochure design or a website, with no thought, care or budget for the words needed to fill any of it out or back any of it up.

Secondly, we know that business people are busy people, and so ultimately there may come a time when they just say, “Tell you what, Jo – I’ll just pay you to do it for me”, and that’s fabulous, because you already know you can trust me based on the advice I’ve given to you that’s already worked!

And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, you need to know something about us. We respect the hell out of language, and whatever our creative styles or preferences on grammatical rules and social writing norms, copywriters believe that good literacy should be accessible for all, and that written language is a wonderful legacy we’ll all leave for future generations.

If you think that last viewpoint is a little OTT, though – and perhaps it is – then let me be a bit more ‘Jo’ for you.  We physically and mentally cannot stand having to deal with shit writing at every turn in our personal and professional lives. Inappropriate word choice, haphazard spellings, and perplexing sentence structures… it’s all linguistic fuckery, and it’s needless. The more advice we can give to help people correct or avoid this, the better we’ll all feel.

So, maybe we are all indeed lovely, but perhaps we’re a little selfish as well.

Go on, ask me something!