Tag Archives: copy

Your Copy Sucks: You Don’t Even Know What “Edit” Means

type writer keyPlease consider this a gentle nudge in the direction of proper usage. I am not angry with you, dear thing. Almost everyone makes the same mistake time and time again. But for your elucidation:

Editing is not the same thing as copyediting.

When you talk about making sure all the commas are in the right place? That’s copyediting. When you think about taking a red pen to a piece of writing? You’re probably thinking of copyediting. It’s something wholly different than editing-editing, and you should probably know the difference.

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Your Copy Sucks: your words will go down in history

Here’s a bold statement that I’m sure I’ll be forced to prove somewhere around the end of this post: the things we write when we flack, market, and rep products can change the course of history.

I’ll let that stew in your brain-soup for just a moment while I take what must seem like a sharp right turn in this argument.

I want you to think about makeup, and what makeup is all about. I’m not anti-makeup. I wear it just like any other businesswoman does. Without foundation, powder, eyeliner, eye shadow, lip liner, lipstick, mascara, and eyebrow pencils, our faces do not look very pretty. We have blemishes and freckles and age spots and wrinkles. We have sallow eyes and pale lips and bushy eyebrows and ingrown hairs.

Without makeup, we are ugly. Makeup makes up for these deficiencies.

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