Culture

Copywriting workshop: sticky lines

As we've written on previous posts, Roger Horberry is a successful independent copywriter who is highly regarded in the design, branding and advertising industries. His books – most recently 'Brilliant Copywriting' and 'Sounds Good on Paper' – are well respected and thoroughly enjoyable texts on the skills and techniques required to create effective, engaging writing.

Back in January, Roger ran a very successful 'tone of voice' workshop for the second years and last week the third year copywriters had an innovative workshop from him all about writing 'sticky lines'.

This is what third year copywriter Kayleigh Brookes wrote about the day:-

"A sticky line is a tag line, strap line or slogan that sticks in your head. Roger explained three things that were necessary to make a line 'sticky': 1) It has to be memorable; 2) It has to inspire action; and 3) It has to be appealing.

Roger gave us tasks to help develop techniques of writing a ‘sticky line': rhetoric (alliteration), puns and rhyme. These techniques were great – they grew our passion for copy, we had a lot of fun and even enjoyed being a little cheesy! We learned a lot and got some great feedback and encouragement.

Roger left us with some final advice of what to do and what not to do, namely:-Keep it simple; don’t write something your competitor can use; you don’t have to be original just say it in a way it hasn’t been said before and, most importantly, never be boring."

We look forward to welcoming Roger back to Lincoln very soon. A true friend of the course.