Can You Really Be A Copywriter With English As Your Second Language?

Oh, I have news for you...

Strictly speaking, German is my second language and English is my third. But this is all irrelevant. This is why...

Copywriting is about knowing how buyers make decisions and aligning the written words with this decision-making process.

And having been a buyer for about a decade gives me a definite advantage. There certainly are copywriters who can manipulate words better than I can. But this is trivial. They don't understand the process with which they have to align their words.

The vital part is the decision-making process which I fully understand, while most technology copywriters don't. So, they end up writing sales letters or other marketing and sales documents that are full of emotional hot-button pounding and phrases that undermine the selling company's credibility.

The other form of the same disaster is when techies with some spare time on their hands write copy. Companies justify this lunacy with the fact that they know their gadgets the best.

And then they are surprised when these letters create sales resistance and position them as fungible vendors [options: peddles or hucksters] as opposed to respected industrial experts.

And when I apply my knowledge and insights as a former engineer and buyer to the sales pieces I write, although I appreciate my Cambridge education in English, my ESL English is as irrelevant as it can possibly be. It's fair to say that copywriters could write copy in any language they care to learn. They have the innate talent to fiddling with words. And some of them even understand the whole process.

"A British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta." ~ Stephen King in his book, On Writing

I love this quotation from good ol' Steve, although I'm not British. I have British education and lived there for 10 years but that's all. But even this can help.

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