Linguistic Jobs

I was taking doctoral level investigation and English composition classes when I first ventured into the riveting globe of Marketing and advertising. At my Arizona Graduate School, a local CBS Television affiliate had advertised for a student writer with strong grammar abilities in the School’s Vocational Office. Desperate for some additional money, I jumped on my bicycle and rode down to the Tv station and just before I knew it I was writing tv promos for Murder She Wrote, Oprah, and PAC 10 March Madness. I learned how to edit, do voice-overs, add music… and make my small promos come to life.

As I left Graduate School the allure of selling with words seemed far much more rewarding than teaching disinterested students how to write. I swiftly learned that great writing is at the core of excellent advertising and marketing. A Television spot is only as excellent as its script. A internet site is only as great as its content. A Print Ad is only as excellent as its copy. A product provide is only as good as how well it persuades the consumer to take an action. Whether 1 requirements the verbosity of an advertorial or the sparing character limitations of a Google or Facebook Ad… good copy is an art form and excellent writers are fairly simply disappearing.

It is clear that it was bound to happen. Calculators made us weaker at math. Spell check created us poor spellers. Programmable phones created us far more forgetful. And now Texting in Icons and Acronyms that replace feelings and self-expression has severely limited our ability to market, sell, and create a Call-to-Action.

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Must we declare war on cyber coding and all assaults on intelligent speech, sound verbal abilities, linguistic style, and high creative expression? Has e-mail-speak, texting talk, Search engine optimization key phrases, and IM chat left our language battered and broken? Years ago, my mother’s generation recorded issues in short-hand, an abbreviated writing strategy for rapid note-taking that saw its hey-day in the 1950′s. Brief-hand systems go as far back as Ancient Greece where we locate evidence of symbol-based writings carved in marble slabs in the Parthenon.

But there was no lack of expression amongst the Ancient Greeks or in 1950′s America. Yesterday’s stenographers ultimately translated their symbols into full phrases, bold emotion, and well-penned thoughts.

So perhaps the job of today’s writers is to do, precisely that… translate modern symbols to and from common feelings. 1 can’t possibly hope to clarify, describe, illustrate, elucidate, clarify, and express the attributes of a Tv, Internet, Print or multi-channel product without getting able to paint it with words. For that reason, I could quite well be the last remaining “empiricist” or one who holds the view that the senses are the only form of information and that “sense words” are the root means of understanding. Or, I am a stalwart linguist. Maybe, hell bent on the study and impact of language whether or not historical, evolutionary, sociological, or neurological.

Despite what I am now known as, 1 factor is extremely clear… if you want to market a product or a service in 2011, you desperately want the services of a really excellent writer.

So I stay at my Advertising and marketing canvas with an arsenal of sensory words, terms and expressions along with wide-ranging requests to write video scripts, ads, business plans, presentations, speeches and even comedy skits. I fancy myself a word-artist and an endangered anti-rationalist toying with the tabula rasa (clean slate) that is the consumer mind and filling it and enriching it with those issues that it most desperately needs… in the subsequent twenty minutes!

Trish Mahon, President of Outsource Marketing and advertising Group in Los Angeles (http://www.omg-usa.com), has been developing powerful, results-driven Direct Response Advertising campaigns for over 18 years. She has worked in-residence for IBM, The Franklin Mint, KOLD-Tv (CBS), Kent &amp Spiegel, Guthy-Renker, Tri-Star Items, Sears Property Central, and Quantum Tv. Mahon’s consulting clients include D-to-C, DRTV and Multi-Channel Direct Marketing leaders.