Words influence our thoughts, our decisions, and our actions. They have a palpable effect on our lives. You can accomplish anything by saying the right word to the right person at the right time. That’s the power of words. (And of good timing, but mostly of words.) No one is more acutely aware of this than copywriters—people who use words to persuade other people to do something, like buying a service or a product. But even copywriters can be influenced by words. In fact, if they want to be any good, they have to be. It’s just a matter of choosing the right words to be influenced by.
Tested Advertising Methods (Fifth Edition) by John Caples
“They laughed when I sat down at the piano—But when I started to play!” is often cited as one of the best advertising headlines of all time. It sat on the top of a very long ad for the U.S. School of Music, giving the readers precisely enough information to make them want to find out what happened when the protagonist started to play, and why the people were laughing in the first place. The headline was written in an era when long-form ads were printed regularly, long before sponsored content was invented, even before the first television ad was aired. The man who crafted it ninety years ago was John Caples, and he did it in his first year of working as a copywriter…
