The importance of microcopy

Jul 16, 2009 Comments

Here’s an interesting blog post I was just reading. It talks about the importance of microcopy. Microcopy is something my clients never pay me to write and in more than 99% cases they skip the pages the require microcopy, for instance, the contact us page, or some other page requiring one or two sentences. But I remember a client, a long time ago, making me write small sentences on the contact us page to succinctly explain the purpose of individual email addresses. He paid for it like a normal page.

The post I have linked to above gives some examples of miscommunications that may occur due to a missing or a wrongly expressed sentence. A good example is, “To pay by PayPal you don’t need a PayPal account”. This is an important message and if you are accepting payment through paypal then you should inform (the ones not already informed) because many clients and customers may not do business with you if they think just for a single transaction they may have to register at a 3rd-party website.

Microcopy constitutes of tiny, seemingly innocuous expressions we assume our visitors are already aware of and that is why sometimes we skip them. For instance, while you are asking people to subscribe to your electronic newsletter, sometimes you forget to tell them that you are not going to spam them or their email addresses will never be sold. This is given, and you know that you are never going to spam your subscribers, but telling them makes them more eager to subscribe. Or if you want your customer to create an account before he or she can purchase from you, you forget to mention that after creating an account they can track the shipment or make the next purchase more easily.

As the blog post rightly says, microcopy alleviates small concern that might not look monumental but may become a deciding factor when they are thinking about doing business with you.

So should you pay your copywriter for taking care of your microcopy? It depends, but to be frank, whatever helps you do your business better, has commercial value.

Torture or fun, writing is just like any passion you follow, or is it?

Jul 01, 2009 Comments

Is there a “tortured writer myth”? If there is I’m yet to come across, at least in a personal sense. I was just reading this blog post titled The Myth of the Tortured Writer where the writer has tried to bust the myth. Whereas I totally agree that writing doesn’t necessarily have to be a gut-wrenching experience it doesn’t always have to be “fun”. Writing is creativity. Creativity is like a harvest, a growth of plants. Sometimes the land is so fertile and watered that you don’t have to put in much effort, things grow there just like that. It can be fun growing fruits, vegetables, flowers etc. on such land.

But sometimes the land is barren, the sun is hot and there is no water source nearby, and if you want to grow things there, you have to till, you have to make the soil soft, you have to add manure and you have to bring water to your fields. It’s hard work, but if you’ve made a conscious decision to get a harvest from that land, you’re going to get it.

Being a writer I’m a bit biased. Writing is more akin to creating a world and then diving into it whether it is molten lava or pleasantly cold writer. It is a story, and a story has its agony and ecstasy, and this is the beauty of writing.

Having said that, I believe writing-related difficulties and blocks are overrated and needlessly blown out of proportion. Some people are constantly writing, and some are perpetually caught in the cobweb of their mental blocks. Whenever you feel trapped like that, do some reading, especially writers you enjoy reading, aspire to emulate. Write on a subject slightly different from the current topic you’re writing on. Write from a different perspective. You will soon emancipate yourself from the “torture” and start writing as if you’re seamlessly playing music and are enthralled by it.