Whether you’re a poet who hopes to apply your skills to a more lucrative genre, or a copywriter who is looking for a new perspective on your discipline, this course will offer insights into ways to expand your writing repertoire.
At first sight, poetry and marketing copy would seem to be two entirely different writing genres: on the one hand, poetry is an art - one of the highest literary forms - while the commercial nature of marketing materials place copywriting firmly at the other end of the scale.
This brief course aims to show that there is no such dichotomy: the same techniques that poets use to convey their message and meaning, and to produce the desired emotional response in their audience, can also be used in marketing materials to affect and influence the potential client.
Based on the premise that "words are not enough", we’ll look at how literal meaning, word-associations and cultural connotations, sound, metre, line breaks and layout can be combined and crafted to create different effects and moods. Understanding these techniques will draw attention to some of the subliminal effects produced by the marketing copy we encounter each day and make us more aware of the effects we create when producing our own business literature.
