On 5\/15\/09, Susanna K. Hutcheson said on this blog that copywriting is a skill that takes many decades of learning and doing before one is truly a master at it.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, many of the superstars in Internet marketing — a key skill of which is writing (of both copy and content) — are barely out of diapers.<\/p>\n
Which would lead one to conclude that copywriting is fairly easy and can be learned rather quickly.<\/p>\n
I am increasingly ambivalent about this question.<\/p>\n
At times, I read copy by the top pros (Clayton Makepeace, Frank Joseph) that dazzles me and turns me green with envy — and I conclude that copywriting is a skill that, after 3 decades, I am just starting to get the hang of (and that I have so long to go in my training!).<\/p>\n
On the other hand, I have also seen writing from younger folks that has me pretty damned impressed (and also some that makes me cringe, which I almost never see from the masters).<\/p>\n
So what’s the truth here?<\/p>\n
A–Susanna is right: it takes decades to master the skill of copywriting. <\/p>\n
B–Copywriting is easy. Any idiot can do it.<\/p>\n
C–Copywriting is a skill that can be learned. Yes, it takes practice. But it’s not brain surgery.<\/p>\n
D–Other (fill in your answer here):__________________________________________<\/p>\n
My view is that writing in general and copywriting in particular is like learning to play the piano: easy to do poorly; exceedingly difficult to do well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On 5\/15\/09, Susanna K. Hutcheson said on this blog that copywriting is a skill that takes many decades of learning and doing before one is truly a master at it. On the other hand, many of the superstars in Internet marketing — a key skill of which is writing (of both copy and content) — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}