About texts and images in your head

It is not uncommon to hear people say, “Anyone can write.” Indeed, based on our school education alone, everyone should be able to write an email or string together a few meaningful sentences during their studies. Speaking of school, we are all familiar with the wonderful structure we learned in German class: “introduction – main body – conclusion.” And yes, lovers of the German language use the genitive case instead of the dative and “drin” instead of “drinne,” ‘einzige’ instead of “einzigste” with conviction—always and without exception.

There are extremely amusing works on the pitfalls, traps, and alarmingly widespread abysses of written and spoken expression. These have long included “Der Dativ ist dem Genetiv sein Tod” (The dative is the death of the genitive) by Bastian Sick and “Bin ich denn der Einzigste hier, wo Deutsch kann?” (Am I the only one here who can speak German?), in which Andreas Hock simply classifies the German language as a “linguistic relic” due to the influence of English.

So far, so entertaining. Nevertheless, at certain points in the book, the question arises as to how it is possible that a language that moved people to tears with its poetry and melodiousness, a language that brought poets and thinkers from this country eternal world fame, is increasingly responsible for grammatical chaos and bizarre imagery.

Need an example? In sports reporting, in this case on a youth tennis tournament, “a player sniffed the fresh air of the courts” before “hitting her way into the quarterfinals.” What's going on here? Are we reading about a child playing tennis, a sniffing dog, or even a violent “enfant terrible”? What's more, the final report proved that the matches were probably not decided on the court, but at the tombola drum, with the words “They drew the lots for the final.” Roger Federer would probably think, on reading this, that he could have spared himself many a grueling training session if it is possible to reach finals by reaching into a lottery drum.

The great Latin American authors are much more subtle. The so-called “magical realism” – outstandingly influenced by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez – creates wonderful images full of light and color. Images that combine facts and myths, harsh reality and wondrous events into a symphony of words.

Now, it doesn't have to be our goal to hold a Nobel Prize for Literature in our hands someday. Authors, journalists, agency copywriters, and press officers don't have to create “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and thus a Colombian cultural heritage or a girl with green hair and yellow eyes like Isabel Allende in The House of the Spirits. However, apt statements and coherent images would indeed be a good thing.

Back to “Anyone can write.” Or even: “Writing is a craft and can therefore be learned.” Hallelujah. There are plenty of blogs and guides on the subject. So, head to the internet and you'll be able to write great texts in no time, right? Not so fast. Good advice such as “use fewer adjectives,” “keep it short,” and “start with the most important information” are generalities that don't apply to all forms of writing. In sports reporting, the most important thing, namely the result, should be found in the first few sentences. The same applies to the text on the home page of a website. For a crime writer, on the other hand, this would probably have fatal consequences in terms of building suspense.

Versatility is definitely required in everyday agency work. It is important to know exactly what you want to write when planning. What is the exact topic? Who is the target audience? What is the main message? What should the text trigger in the reader: knowledge through facts, expectations through promises, entertainment through anecdotes, analogies, quotes? What is exciting for the recipient and not for the sender? All of this must be considered in the briefing, in the concept, and in the final implementation.

Impossible? Not at all. At DRIVE, we create a wide variety of texts for websites of all kinds: from associations to pharmaceutical companies, from IT providers to adult education centers. Our portfolio includes image texts for magazines as well as annual reports, press releases, content for social media, and blogs.

This list alone makes it clear that no template, no general guidelines for structure, and no rules for the use of adjectives or sentence length will help here. The historical analysis of a company presentation for an image text has completely different requirements than writing texts for a website. While the former is structured like a short novel, the latter must be characterized by quickly recognizable facts and a logical structure in the menu and subpages.

So are copywriters the much-cited “jack of all trades”? Absolutely – at least in this area. But they are no more or less important than the visually striking creativity of the design, the attention to detail of the developers when writing the code, or the forward-thinking approach of the strategy. Good text and the ability to present facts clearly are a small but important cog in the overall drive of DRIVE. This includes correct spelling, grammatical accuracy, and the ability to create images that come together to form a small work of art for clients and readers. Even if this is definitely not a girl with green hair and yellow eyes.