Building theatre patronage : management and merchandising (1927)

Copy 301 something that only the highly educated can write. Real copy comes from one who is enthused. So of all effective writing. It is usually not the college professor in a comfortable library chair with nothing to worry about who writes — and gets results. If many of them could get results they would not be professors. Effective writing does not depend on a fancy education. A college degree — even a list of degrees which looks like half the alphabet — does not make a writer. Literary taste is one thing; power to write is another, an altogether different, thing. Of course, a knowledge of technical language devices is very helpful — but it is not everything, not half of it. Great writing has been done by "roughnecks" — and the professors put in the punctuation, perhaps, or corrected the spelling, or more likely raved about the "masterpiece" after the "roughneck" was buried. When a man has a real message, when he loves hard, or hates hard, or fears hard — when his enthusiasm is just exploding — he writes in a way that makes the readers yell "Hurrah" or "I want to buy one." Consequently, effective copy is not a matter of searching for words and embroidering them on paper. The words come fast and true when enthusiasm bursts into a message. So, if you are not warmed up hot with enthusiasm for what you are selling, don't play with cold words. If you go feeling for fancy words before you are bursting with the message, the result will be — just words.