Copywriting

Goodbye then, Norwich Union

Andrew Moss, Chief Executive of Norwich Union, has written to me. Not to me alone, you'll understand. Quite probably to you, too, if Norwich Union provides you with insurance, or a pension, or life assurance or any other kind of financial services package.

Andrew wants me to know that the Norwich Union brandname is about to disappear for ever, to be replaced by the globally-inoffensive 'Aviva'.

Andrew is very keen, in a rather well drafted letter, to make sure I understand that he and his colleagues don't think that they like ditching Norwich Union. He's respectful and affectionate about the brand he's discarding after 212 years. But he wants me to understand that Aviva, which is the name created in 2000 to wrap together Norwich Union, Commercial Union and General Accident (all once proud brand names on the UK financial services landscape), now operates in 27 countries, serving 45 million customers.

Now I understand that many of these 45 million customers don't know what Norwich Union is, have no idea about why a company would be called that, and will find it as impossible to be confused by the meaningless and unmemorable Aviva as I. Indeed, for them, Aviva is probably preferable.

Not for me, however. When I was first making enough to invest a few pounds each month, I did it with Norwich Union, and a decade later they served me up a surprisingly handsome return.

2 piffling little bits of the protection on my mortgage, now drawing towards their long-time-coming maturity, are with Norwich Union.

And once, many years ago, Norwich Union was my client, with its marketing Director who left work early every Wednesday to play village cricket. We made 2 fine tv commercials together for his brand, all about planning for life's ups and downs, and I'm as proud of them today as I was in 1991.

So goodbye, Norwich Union. In an age of brand names designed to mean nothing, the work of genius branding consultancies who can ensure that the name you are considering does not mean 'Your Mother Is A Tinkers' Whore' in Ecuador, and that its domain may yet be secured in 50 different territories, I for one will miss warm, competent, secure, stable, friendly Norwich Union.

Ours has been a partnership; something all brands crave, yet so few achieve.

Auld Acquaintance

New Year's Eve 2008. And cheery as we may all be between now and midnight, tomorrow morning will dawn soon enough bringing with it the Year of the Further Disintegrating Economy.

Only a fool would offer their view of what the year ahead holds in store as anything more than a musing. There are simply too many variables, and too many normally fixed lumps of the earth's crust moving in flux for anyone at all to predict with any confidence what lies ahead.

But business will go on, albeit without MFI, Woolworths, Adams and __________________ (add your own favourite defunct financial services provider here).

We all need to eat, clothe ourselves and keep roofs over heads. Consequently, people will do what they have always done in troubled times: use their imaginations, ingenuity and initiative to breathe life into new ventures, steer apparently doomed projects around the scariest of hairpin bends and show a resourcefulness otherwise often absent from UK business.

For we band of copywriting brothers (and sisters), it's a huge opportunity. Businesses need to market themselves harder in this economy than in one as bullish as a walk down Pamplona High Street.

New customers need to be enticed.

Old customers need to be updated.

Suppliers need to be encouraged and reassured.

Investors need accurate and regular information.

The media need to fill columns (both digital and printed).

Copywriting has previously proved its value through the French and Russian Revolutions, 2 World Wars, the Great Depression, the General Strike, the rise and fall of Communism and, in recent times, the bursting of the DotCom bubble.

It would be nuts to think it doesn't have a role to play now.

I wish you a happy, healthy and successful 2009.

Your status on Facebook

Society changes fast. Things that don't exist one day, matter like crazy the next. Now if you're not a user of social network site Facebook, this will mean nothing to you; but if you are, you'll know that your 'Status' is the line next to your name in which you can type a few words to tell the world what you're up to right now.

What some people tend not to realise, however, is that by virtue of Facebook's plethora of tentacle like feeds and streams, these few words can very easily end up being notified to just about everyone you know, or work with, or share membership of any of a pile of fairly tenuous 'groups' with.

It's fascinating. With scant regard for the breadth of distribution, some users update their status regularly with details so mundane that to share them is merely to elicit sympathy for the paucity of experience in their lives. Others, however, expose themselves in a far more dangerous way, seeing this as the ideal opportunity to brag about their acquisition of gadgetry or other consumer goodies. What, one wonders, possesses anyone to think that the world will think better of them for knowing they have a new iPod, iPhone, little red Corvette, cheeseburger or anything else. It won't. It's a failing on behalf of the author, a moment of self indulgence which can portray them only in a worse light than that in which they started out. (Unless, of course, they and all their associates are 12 years old.)

So. Be circumspect. In our weird, social networked society, your Facebook status is media. It's a transient poster site for your personal brand on which your friends, relatives and business associates will, consciously or subconsciously, base their current impression of who you are and where your head is.

                   

Lost in translation

In the great canon of Monty Python work, there is a sketch about a man up in court charged with causing a breach of the peace by publishing a phrase book in which the translations do not mean anything remotely like the phrases.

Now you may buy translation, or trust translators, as a part of your regular communications.

If you do, you must go look at this real-life gem.

English people sent the text of a road sign out for translation into Welsh. They got back the translator's Welsh language out-of office autoresponder, assumed that was the translation, and actually made it into a sign and stuck it in the road.

If it's mission critical... get someone else to read it back in translation and confirm its accuracy.

That will be 25 guineas

I am thinking of invoicing in Guineas. Why? To confer upon the commercial practice of copywriting some professional mystique and lustre which it doesn't deserve.

What's a Guinea?

Well..OK. Maybe you're under about 40, or maybe you've never lived in the UK, or moved here after 1971.

Before the UK decimalised its currency in 1971, we had a wonderful if bizarre Pound, divided into 20 shillings, each of which then divided into 12 pence.

So pounds and shillings were the mainstay of the currency.

Guineas though, lived alongside them. There had not been a Guinea coin or note of any description since 1816, but the Guinea was still a significant part of our economy and, more interestingly, our society, until its demise in 1971.

The Guinea was a name for the sum of money One Pound and One Shilling (£1/1/-). It's modern day equivalent is thus £1.05.

What the Guinea denoted however was something remarkable for social rather than economic reasons. It denoted a more civilised way of doing business. Working men toiled for pounds and shillings, but Gentlemen bought and sold land or livestock in Guineas. (Indeed livestock auctions are one of the few places where the Guinea term still remains in parlance.)

Professional men such as Physicians or Lawyers always presented their accounts in Guineas and, I've just read, a Barrister billing 100 Guineas would traditionally retain 100 pounds, but pass the 100 shillings (£5) to his clerk.

It's a fantastic example of how branding can add value. With it's aura of aristocratic dealings, the Guinea connoted breeding and status on those who dealt in it in a way that the same sum expressed in pounds and shillings simply never could.

The edge of copywriting

When I used to work in ad agencies and write TV commercials, people outside of the business would often ask, "So what part do you do? Do you write the words?"

I would then explain patiently to them that though I might have described myself as a copywriter, the remit of my job extended from understanding the client’s marketing objective, or on occasion problem, through helping my strategic planning colleagues to find an appropriate and inventive way to tackle this problem; and from there through taking responsibility for translating the ensuing strategy into an impactful, clear and arresting creative strategy and then executing that into powerful commercials whose plot, action, characters, situations, images, music, titles et al were all my responsibility (in partnership with whichever art directors I was collaborating with at that time).

Not only was that responsibility ours at the start, in our office, while nothing existed save for a blank script page. It was ours in pre-production, once an idea existed, but that idea needed to be found a director and a production company; it was our son the shoot, where we were guardians not only of the integrity of our creative idea, but also of the ensuring the delivery of those elements necessary to ensure the client of proper communication of not only his message, but also of his brand. Finally, it remained our responsibility in Soho's cutting rooms and post-production suites, where a commercial is so often lost or made.

So my view is that 'copywriting' describes, at it's broadest but yet most useful definition, the business of thinking through, organising and then presenting any information at all required to place a case before the world. It’s an advocacy skill, none too distant from that of a barrister. (I spoke recently to a provincial circuit barrister who told me that he frequently receives the file containing the details of the case he is to represent in court only the evening before appearing. Now if that isn’t the same as copywriting…what is?)

Why do I raise this now? Because I've been thinking a lot recently about where the edges of copywriting actually lie for each of us. Not just in our lives as marketing folk, but in our everyday and private lives, too.

This, in truth, is where the title of this blog – 'all copywriters now' – comes from. The idea that in an age where everyone is an accomplished disseminator of communication messaging, all of us now need to 'be' copywriters, taking control of and responsibility for the messages we put out into the world.

But what are the limits of those messages? Do they, indeed, have limits? Let's try out a few based on things I've done myself, or known friends to have done, over the last few weeks.

Was a recent financial restructuring that I wanted to organise, and which required me to present my intentions clearly and positively to several different organisations, a copywriting task? Yes. I believe it was. The same case, put together less carefully and presented less persuasively might well have had an outcome less in line with my objectives that was achieved.

Was a friend placing his profile on an online dating site (answering their questions, selecting a photo of himself to upload to their server) engaged in a copywriting task? Too right he was. He has a clear message to put across to a tightly defined audience, and every word he wrote, and each nuance of the photo he selected, would be picked apart by that audience in making a decision as to whether to 'buy' his offer or not.

Is a sixth form student engaged in a copywriting task when he fills out the 'personal statement' section of his university application? Yes again. Within an imposed limit of 500 words, his job is to convince admissions officers at the educational establishments of his choice that he is the kind of student they are looking for. All his achievements to date, interests and thoughts will count in his favour if presented cogently, or count for nought if hastily listed without any sense of purpose.

You need to complain to the council about services? Isn’t it a copywriting task to come across as a reasonable and responsible citizen with a fair-minded approach yet with, too, an intelligent insistence on what one knows to be one’s due?

You want to negotiate a pay rise, insist on a refund, explain away an indiscretion, explain to a child, mediate in a dispute, advance a cause, project a wholesome image on your Facebook profile or do any of the pile of other things we all need to do every day in the course of living our lives, you need to be able to pull apart the facts, select the most salient (and sometimes, of course, only those beneficial to one’s case), and then present them with impact, guile, energy, seductiveness, persuasiveness or any of the other weapons of war we copywriters wear on our belts.

5500% return on investment? No thanks.

I like small clients.

(Don't get me wrong, all you petite marketers out there.)

I like large clients of course. In fact in some ways I like them more, with their understanding timelines and their appetising Purchase Order pads.

But small clients are the grass routes of the economy, the work we do for them matters more, and the lines of communication are short. Decisions get made fast, the work gets used, thanks are generally offered with genuine gratitude, and invoices get paid.

Now a really nice lady called me yesterday evening. She is a small client, but a savvy one. She knew her own business, she had some basic feel for marketing, and I happily gave her 45 minutes of my thinking about her business problem on the phone.

This morning she was on the phone again. We spent another 30 minutes discussing her options. And we agreed that as a temporary measure until I return from vacation (she wanted to act immediately), a single page, well targetted sales letter which she could get out to the hundred or so appropriate business owners local to her base, and so core to her servicing target, would be her best bet.

"What does that cost?"

I love this bit. Always love it.

"I do work like that through my Great Sales Letters site I explained. "I charge £725 + VAT for a 1-2 page letter."

There's a pause. (You knew there was going to be, didn't you?)

"£75?"

"No. Seven hundred and twenty five pounds", I explained politely. "Plus VAT."

"It costs £725 to write a letter?"

"Well. No." I replied and took a deep breath.

"It costs £25 to write a letter. And it costs £700 for me to sort your muddled and unfocused business model into something approaching presentability, help you develop an offer around which to build a call to action, and then organise your case into a compelling form in which I can present it before a court of 100 local business owners, any one of whom, when they find your story set out in this cogent and persuasive manner, may very well hand you £5,000, or £10,000 or £20,000 worth of business. So let's say we get a 4% response, and let's say they take the middle road and each spend £10,000 with you. You will earn £40,000. Which will be a 5,500% return on your £725 investment in the letter."

There's a long silence at the other end of the line.

"Let me think about it".

Which is why I love small clients.

The touch of a client's hand

"This guy is a sweet enough guy", my ex colleague, who is an agency Account Director, grumbled. "And he's not a bad client", she went on, "but he just holds onto my hand for a bit too long when he shakes it."

Err?

I have been shaking clients' hands for 27 years. It's never happened to me. I put out my hand. The client puts out his. Or hers. We shake. We let go. No sinister lingering. No wistful retention of my fingers, or misinterpretable overfamiliarity with my palm. Not that I've noticed.

So there are 2 possibilities. The first is that I am insensitive to the subtleties of the body language of others. And the other is that my clients just don't fancy me. Dammit.

I have a pen... therefore I am a copywriter

It's amazing how often people who've called to discuss the possibility of having some work done feel the need to excuse themselves by saying something to the effect of "I usually write this kind of thing myself but I don't really have the time at the moment."

Implicit in this is the idea that you will accept that the speaker is perfectly capable of doing on an amateur basis what you do for a living, but is just a tadge pushed at present and so is going to get you to do this for him. It won't be better when you do it. It won't work harder. It won't give him a business advantage. It'll just save him some time. Otherwise he'd do it and his version, presumably, would be just as good as yours.

Do these people do this to other professionals?

"Hi. I would do our tax accounting and annual return myself, but I'm a bit pushed so I thought I'd come to you. Being an accountant."

"Hi. I thought I'd have time to structure my own defense and handle all the protocol in this multi-million pound claim being made against us... but I've got quite a bit come up...so I thought I'd come to you. A lawyer."

"I was going to sew up my hernia myself, actually, Doctor. But I don't really have time so perhaps you could do it?"

You'd think, at the very least, that the culprits would understand how unmotivating this is.

Are you more likely to give your best to clients who begin by telling you that they believe your skill and experience are worthless but that your time is less valuable than theirs? Or to clients who start you off with the news that they believe your skills are capable of driving their business in ways otherwise unachievable?

My warehouse full of words

I recently bought a huge consignment of used words. I got them in a private sale before they went to auction. There are over 2 million in the lot, which is a very decent bundle. Now all of these words have been used before, but they are all in good condition, and all are clean. They could be counted on to work perfectly again in new pieces of copy.

There are a lot of nouns, as there always are in job lots like this. But the broker told me before I purchased that there were over 350,000 adjectives in there, as well, and around a quarter million verbs. There are also some very nice old adverbs which date back to before the war, but which are still in serviceable condition.

I have my words in a warehouse over in Docklands.

They're not sorted. They're just in a huge pile. On the floor. A huge mishmash of words.

Of course, they don't make any sense right now, lying there like so much old scrap metal. They don't sell anything to anyone. Don't persuade anyone to do anything. They don't announce. Or inform. Or advertise.

They're just a load of old words right now. No meaning. No power. No impact.

You're probably wondering what I'm going to do with them.

Am I going to arrange some of them into a persuasive website and use others to build hugely successful sales letters?

No.

I'm going to keep them.

And sell them off, just as they are, to people who ring up and ask me how much per word I charge.

Now...where's that Post It note?

This is not a commercial plug. It's not an affiliate link. It's just one of those moments when you discover a product you love and want to tell everyone how cool it is.

I have long been a fan of 'Lifehacker' blogger Gina Trappani, and a passionate acolyte to her philosophy of finding and using software and tricks which can lessen your pain and increase your productivity.

After years of using a spiral bound day book to keep track of tasks to be completed, I just downloaded a software beta version of a Mac application called Things.

(This is only going to be of interest if you, like me, work mainly on Macs.)

In 2 days it has wooed and seduced me. The Post It notes are gone from my desktop. My day book lies on my desk untouched.

The copywriter's obligation

If you click this link you'll be able to read the story which BBC News carried this week about a direct mail pack sent out by the Reader's Digest which appears to use particularly suggestive phrasing to lead its readers into participating in a prize draw.

The letter includes the intimation that the recipient has been preferentially selected to take part in a potentially valuable draw, but that the Digest is urging them to keep this very quiet in order to avoid invoking the envy of their friends and neighbours.

Now the psychology is obvious and well proven. The suggestion that this is such a special opportunity that you would really be best off keeping it to yourself shifts the unwary reader beyond thinking about whether the offer is of any interest (which the sender does not want them doing) and on to worrying about a whole new problem: how to keep jealous neighbours from snaffling your Reader's Digest Prize Draw mail pack because it's clearly such a great offer that it's been necessary to warn you that this is a serious risk.

Now you may think this is just silly, but keep in mind that the target of any Reader's Digest DM campaign is likely to be older and what used to be called lower middle class (C1C2 for those of you familiar with ABC socioeconomic classifications).

Recipients of this letter might of course be perfectly bright, alert and savvy...but there's also a very good chance that they will be of slightly less keen perception and judgement in these matters, may have less than full contact with the commercial world, and might get little mail and thus take very seriously that which they do receive. They are likely, too, to be of a generation which views anything printed as 'official' and so important to comply with.

Doubtless much to the chagrin of the Digest's PR people Cath Allan, the lady whose daughter has blown the whistle on this particular mail pack, looks like everyone's idea of a lovely old gran.

But the truth is that the skill of the Digest's copywriters has persuaded this lady to part with over £800 in the last 12 months to pay for books which she probably didn't want, but which were necessary in order to move to the next stage of prize draws she'd been led to believe she'd almost won already.

Now the Trading Standards Authority are unhappy about this letter, though it looks as though the Advertising Standards Authority might just about OK it. But my question is where the copywriter stands in this?

I have no idea whether this was written by an in-house writer, or by a freelancer, and of course the Digest's DM people are highly expert, and may well have requested this mechanism from their writer.

But the writer has an obligation, in my view, which cannot be excused by protesting that he or she is simply a hired gun who does whatever is in the best interests of their client.

I believe that to use your skills in a way which your professional experience tells you is likely to cause harm to innocent people, particularly vulnerable people, is morally and ethically wrong.

It cheapens your worth, slights your professionalism and is just, well, bad.

I spent my 18 year ad agency career declining to work on cigarette brands, even though I had the chance to work on several.

Then shortly after I became a freelance writer, I was offered a substantial and regular flow of work on a cigarette brand. I needed the workflow, so I agreed to do it and did it for about a year. To this day I regret it, and my only comfort is that none of the work I did ever ran, anyway.

From time to time we all find ourselves confronted with a business model, strategy or project with which we feel less than comfortable.

It's a great challenge to try and re-engineer it, taking your client with you, so that it avoids causing harm while still achieving its commercial goals.

But it's also a great feeling to say to a client, or even an employer, that you don't feel comfortable with writing something because you feel its purpose runs counter to what you believe is right.

Look rich for less today

"Look rich for less today."

Good line, isn't it? I pinched it from a piece of SPAM in my inbox selling fake luxury-brandname wristwatches.

The interesting thing about it is the cultural difference between the person who its author wrote it for and the person reading it, in this case me.

I'm a middle class Brit. So I've been brought up to think that "looking rich" is vulgar. And the idea of "looking rich" "for less" is almost too awful for words.

Not only could I "look rich", which I think is tacky, but I could do it on a cheapskate budget which assumes that I hang out with people too unsophisticated to recognise the fakery, or give a damn that I am a fellow who thinks cheap tacky fakes are OK.

Imagine I'm in Africa though. Or the Middle East. Or Eastern Europe. Places where the sensibilities are different. Not the sensibilities of the educated international elite amongst their populations. The sensibilities of their broad, urban wannabe masses (who are not so different, incidentally, from our urban wannabe masses). The people who want the jewellery, the cars, the trainers, the fragrances they see in American movies and European magazines.

These are people for whom "looking" rich is cool, and where doing it "for less today" is estimable, because getting a 'bargain' is a great thing.

So you and I might recoil when we read that line.

But I'm willing to bet that it's spamming author knows precisely what he's doing.

Why Gordon Brown is such an awful webpage

Tony the Webpage.

He was well laid out. He had a sharp, tightly constructed headline that delivered its message, and a few short and well utilised paras of copy that underpinned the message with some salient (even if untrue) facts and sent you away knowing what he wanted you to know.

(He may have spun, lied or whatever else you would accuse him of, but he communicated. Told you what he wanted you to know.)

Now Gordon the Webpage.

Gordon is the worst kind of webpage. Gordon has a poor layout. It's hard to know where to look when you look at Gordon. Gordon is what happens if you refuse to acknowledge the way the user uses the medium. Gordon is what happens if you insist on sticking all of your knowledge and expertise down on your page with a dull subject title rather than a headline, and hope that your readers will plow through it and emerge fifteen minutes later nodding in agreement with you.

They won't.

They will click off and surf over to David the Webpage.

Who is not a webpage at all.

But more of a splash intro.

Direct Mail, Internet Marketing and Short Skirts

I threw a valuable morning this week at the Direct Marketing Fair at Earls Court, which was sharing the hall, conveniently, with the Internet Marketing Fair.

On one side of the room: database-genius companies whose solutions I don't pretend to understand but who could doubtless show you how to get a mailpack in front of Osama Bin Laden.

On the other side of the room: mind-numbingly brilliant people with solutions doing impossible things...like recutting your web content dynamically to build millions of instantly optimised extra pages for your site while you have a cup of coffee.

Yet on both sides of the room...just here and there...were skinny blonde women in absurdly short and tight skirts manning stands, presumably, because the MDs of some of these brilliant, cutting edge, 21st century companies still feel that a blonde in a short skirt might just be needed to close the deal.

Why we work freelance

My neighbours leave for work at 8.30am.

At 8.49 this morning, having worked late last night, I was heading for the shower when I glanced out of the window.

There, in their garden, was a grey heron.

A beautiful, slender creature, 3 feet in height, helping himself to a carp out of the little pond in their garden.

I grabbed a camera and photographed him as he stood over his prize, flip-flapping for its life on their back lawn.

Then he picked it up and shook it.

And then he thrust his razorbill beak upwards, extending neck and head to the morning sky, and swallowed the carp whole, standing quite still as his throat expanded to allow its doubtless still wriggling form to sink to its final resting place in the juices of his stomach.

The point of the story?

Stay home and work freelance. You'll never know what happens in your back yard while you're sitting in that traffic jam.

The medium and the message

Go look at this! Chocolate people Thorntons have launched a service that lets you send a boxed, edible, text-style message using 2 or 3 rows of 11 small, square chocolate truffles, each with a letter piped on top in chocolate.

Why am I writing about it? Because it's a smart, fun, contemporary way to sell their chocolates, and get themselves talked about, both of which deserve recognition.

And because honing any message to make it work in 22 or 33 characters is hard, as anyone who writes Adwords campaigns will testify.

Make My Logo Bigger Cream

I think the days of clients who believe that their logo must always be huge, and that every last square centimetre of an ad, site, or brochure must be filled up in order to get full value from the money they're spending on it, have largely gone. But if you still have the odd client of this kind, 'Make My Logo Bigger Cream' might just solve your Xmas gift problems.

Free rice

More words at your disposal means... you're free to dumb down from an even larger pool when you write your copy in order to be sure of being understood.

Freerice.com is a good-hearted way to fuel your own vocabulary, while putting food in the mouths of hungry people. I won't even explain here how it works. Just go along, spend a few minutes, and do some good for yourself, some good for your readers and, most importantly, some good for someone hungry. The image at the top of the piece is linked.

Black coffee

Why is a cup of black coffee now undergoing a nationwide rebadge as an Americano? Those of us who like our coffee black, through a filter or out of a cafetierre know this to be the truth. You go into Starbucks. You ask for a black coffee. The Starbucker behind the counter will look at you blankly and say 'An Americano?' The answer is "No. A black coffee." ('Black coffee' was good enough for Paul Schrader when he wrote Taxi Driver, as I recall.) Why does it matter? In coffee-pedant terms, it matters in as much as the Americano thing is, apparently, an espresso (ie a steam pressured coffee forced through a fine coffee grind) with a load of hot water added at the end to fill up a big cup, wheras a black filter coffee involves pouring hot water over roasted, ground coffee beans and catching each delicious and coffee-laden drip that comes through. In a wider sense, however, it matters for a different reason: it's a malicious effort by a US company to introduce and own a word unknown in this country 2 or 3 years ago, to attempt to have that 'owned' word usurp a fine generic name with an indigenous heritage and, worst of all, to brush over the fact that you're not even getting the cup of coffee you wanted! And if writers don't fight for the language of coffee...who the hell's going to?

Coffee copy

Clarity is good. A cornerstone of what copywriting is all about and all that. Better to communicate to all, than to presume knowledge on the part of the reader and fail to communicate by having done this. Ok. No problem there. But is it really necessary to write 'SUITABLE FOR VEGETARIANS' on the side of a jar of coffee? (Thank you, Tesco Fair Trade).

Continual or Continuous

If it's 'continual', it happens time after time, with a break between each.

"Rainy days are a continual occurrence in Manchester."

If it's 'continuous', it happens without a break.

"On the day in question, the rain in Manchester had been continuous."

And I, of course, continually have to look this one up.

'Relevant', damn it.

Just about everyone has some words they can't spell. I have no idea whether this has some psychological or neurological rationale, and I daresay that in the days when people all had classical educations it wasn't such a big deal, but now everyone has their 'bad' words.

I say this because I have just had to look up 'relevant'. I have to look up 'relevant' at least once a week. It simply will not stick in my head, and never has done, that it has an 'ant' ending and not an 'ent' ending. (I know! Why on earth would it be 'ent'?)

Here's the plan.

Get a post-it note or a small record card, and write on it the 10 words you always stumble on. Build up the list as you come to them naturally over the course of a month. You'll know immediately one comes up that it belongs on your list.

Keep the card or stickie above your desk. And see how useful it turns out!