Well, it’s been a while, but I’m back.

Just to fill you in on what I’ve been doing the past few months: I’ve been creating, producing and marketing my own proofreading course.

This was something I sort of felt duty-bound to do, after a brother of a friend was stung for £200 for a proofreading course that was, by and large, a waste of time, effort and money. The proofreading course in question wasn’t entirely useless and I couldn’t in all honesty refer to it as a ‘scam’, but there was a huge amount of unnecessary padding that seemed to be there purely to justify the ludicrous price tag.

In response to my shooting my mouth off at length about the course’s shortcomings, my friend challenged me to do better.

That’s what I get for shooting my mouth off.

Anyway, the course is published (in eBook format) and is currently selling quite well. I’m particularly pleased with the content of the website (see how I brought things back ‘on topic, there?). If you’re interested, it’s called The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course, it’s available for the ludicrously polite price of just £7.99, and you’ll find it and its supporting website here.

I've enjoyed this little excursion but, I must say, it is good to be back.

I haven’t blogged in a while.

Apologies.

There’s no excuse.

I’ve been working on a large writing project and a heap of associated web activity. It’s something of a side project of mine that’s been percolating nicely for a while but has finally reached an ‘all or nothing’ phase in its development.

I’ve managed to keep up with my copywriting, content writing and third-party blogging activities, but something had to give and my own blog was it. As Homer said to Marge, when she suggested the field they were farming required more fertiliser, “I’m only one man!”

Yes, I know: excuses, excuses...

But normal services will resume as soon as humanly possible.

As I said, my contractual obligations are uneffected, so if you're looking for someone to help you out with a little content creation, copywriting or proofreading, just let me know.

Michael

I've recently added a forum of sorts onto this website. It's open to anyone who has any questions regarding content writing, copywriting, SEO or anything else they may feel I can help them with.

It's off to a good start, with people as far away as India posing questions. Actually, according to Google Analytics, my website recieves quite a few visits from people in India (not to mention the USA, Canada, Portugal, Mexico, Italy and Singapore).

Questions I've provided answers for to date include: Do Images Count as Content? How Can You Fool Google? How Long Should My Blog Posts Be? and Where's the Best Place to Put My Keywords in My Content?

I've provided helpful (hopefully) answers to all of these questions. Please feel free to post your own. Try to keep them on-topic (content writing, copywriting, SEO, proofreading and web content in general), but if you want to throw me a bit of a curveball, I'll do my best to help you out - just so long as the answer to your question isn't something along the lines of "When a man and woman love each other very much..."

Click here to ask your (reasonably pertinent) questions.

Following the terrible events in Haiti, a number of Liverpool and Merseyside artists are coming together under the Love Haiti banner to put on a benefit gig at the Cavern Club on Friday 29th January.

So far, the line-up includes such luminaries as Alun Parry, Darren Poyzer, Nigel Clarke (of Dodgy fame) and Merseyside’s finest resident lyricist and songwriter Ian Prowse (of Amsterdam and, previously, Pele).

By all accounts, this event is gaining momentum all the time and the artists mentioned promise to be just the tip of the iceberg. I’m personally hoping for the truly-outstanding Shack to make an appearance.

At the time of writing this blog entry, the tragedy in Haiti is estimated to have claimed as many as 200,000 lives, a figure which is almost certain to grow.

To participate in any way whatsoever, go to: http://www.love-haiti.org/, where you'll find contact details.

Thank you.

I’m feeling a little bit pleased with myself. I’ve invented a three letter acronym. Well, I did say ‘a little bit pleased’, not ‘inordinately proud’.

My contribution to the ever-expanding world of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms*) is APE, and it stands for Amusing, Practical or Enlightening, which is what all truly effective online content should be. And by truly effective online content, I mean the kind of online content that will provide visitors to your website with a good experience, the kind of online content that will make them want to bookmark your website and return to it again and again, the kind of online content that they will want to blog and tweet about.

The fact is the vast majority of people online at any given moment aren’t shopping. They’re not looking to purchase a product or pay for a service. If your website is nothing but an online sales-pitch (no matter how eloquent or persuasive) there are vast hordes of web users passing you by. The vast majority of internet users are looking to be entertained, helped or informed. In other words, they want to be Amused, furnished with Practical advice or Enlightened.

Over the next few years, I suspect we’re going to witness a significant paradigm shift in online retail. The standard shop front website is going to all but disappear to be replaced by ‘online experience’ sites that also happen to have shopping facilities annexed onto them or, more accurately, woven throughout. These websites will use masses of compelling, high-quality content to draw in huge quantities of traffic, quantities of traffic far exceeding anything a simple sales pitch could even hope to attract.

So, if you want to get ahead of the competition, you’ll need to make sure your content passes the APE test.

*Of course, TLA isn’t itself actually an acronym. Somebody just isn’t trying hard enough.

I love buses.

He said, zipping his anorak up to his chin.

But I do. I love buses. And trains. That said, I've never been tempted to stand on a platform in the middle of November with a notepad and pen, jotting down serial numbers and what have you.

I like sitting on buses and trains. Because I can write. Thanks to my little PDA. It's a challenge: the keyboard's no bigger than a credit card and the individual keys are about the size of a vole's nipple, but I manage.

I do own a car but I rarely use it during the working day. If I visit a client to take a brief or help out with a presentation, I always hop on the bus. It adds about 15 minutes or so to the commute, but at least it's 15 productive minutes. The average bus journey to my clients in Liverpool city centre takes about 40 minutes. I can produce 400 words of highly-effective content in 40 minutes when I'm firing on all cylinders.

Okay, sometimes (but not often), I get nothing done. Last week a little old lady sat next to me and, without any preamble whatsoever, proceeded to tell me how wonderful her life was now she'd "gone digital". A few weeks before that, some teenagers were smoking a very distinctive and sweet-smelling brand of 'cigarette' behind me and I found it hard to concentrate... for the rest of the day.

But, by and large, for me, buses function as a kind of ‘office on wheels’.

Why am I rambling on about buses? Well, I’ve just read that a £6 million fleet of new buses is soon to be introduced to Liverpool and Merseyside. 46 Alexander Dennis Enviro 300 buses, no less.

What can I say? I’m very excited.

I’ll get me anorak.

I’ve just completed a free web content assessment for somebody who enquired via my mailing list opt-in form. Someone who is now my latest client, I’m pleased to say.

I think what clinched it was a little piece of advice I gave them that will enable them to triple the value of their web content without them actually having to do very much. I thought I’d share that nugget of content writer wisdom with you.

Imagine you’ve just written a 400-word article, a ‘Top Ten Tips’ fact sheet, say. Now, you could just drop this onto your website as a great piece of content. But what if you submitted your fact sheet to one of the major online article sites, like EzineArticles? Now, you’ve got a back-link to your website. And what if you were to send your fact sheet to your mailing list as a free eShot? Now, you’ve reconnected with your customers, given them a positive experience and pushed your brand to the forefront of their minds. And what if you were to make your fact sheet available as a downloadable pdf on your site as part of a growing resource centre which is made instantly accessible to anybody signing up to your mailing list? Now you’ve created a means of growing your mailing list.

None of this will fall foul of Google’s ‘duplicate content’ rules, as there is only one instance of this content actually live online: the Ezine article.

Just a single 400-word piece of content and you’ve created a valuable back-link to your site, given your existing customers a great experience and provided an incentive for people to add themselves to your mailing list.

Just 400 words of content (for which I’d charge as little as £30, incidentally) can really do all that.

One piece of content, triple the value.

Obviously, I wouldn’t recommend this method for every item of content, as you’d have nothing on your website itself, which would be commercially disastrous, but if you were to follow this approach for every third or fourth item of content, you’d soon begin to reap the rewards in terms of web traffic and page rank.

At a meeting this morning I was introduced to one of my client's clients in the following manner:

"And this is Mike Sellars. He's our Content Provider."

I let it go. It wouldn't do to cause a scene. Even in the face of actionable slander.

The remainder of the meeting passed without incident. In fact, it went rather well. Once I was alone with my client, however, I said, "'Content Provider'? Really? What did I do to deserve that?"

"Well you are, aren't you?" was the dispassionate response.

"No. I'm not. I'm not a content provider. I'm a content writer."

"Well, yeah, that as well."

"No. Not 'as well'. I'm a content writer. I don't provide anything. Utility companies provide. Distant bodies. The uninvolved."

I found myself on the receiving end of a 'here we go again' look.

"But you source video for us, as well, don't you?"

"Yes, I suppose..."

"Well that's not writing, is it?"

"No, I suppose..."

"And you source widgets and other interesting online bits and pieces. You even copy the html and email it to us. That's not writing, is it? And what about all the public domain stuff you hunt down and package up for us?"

"Well, yeah, but... yeah. There is that." I probably forgot to mention that this particular client has an irritating habit of being right about things with infuriating regularity.

"So you're not just our content writer, you're our content... now, what's a good word for someone who provides something?"

A sigh. Then, "Provider?"

"Yeah, that's it. You're our content provider. I think it has a nice ring to it."

I probably forgot to mention that this particular client has an irritating tendency toward sarcasm, too.

"I mean, what would you prefer?" he continued. "Content Supplier?"

"Makes me sound like I work in a timber yard."

"Content Purveyor?"

"Makes me sound like an Edwardian showman."

"Content--"

"Yeah, all right. I get the point. Content Provider."

But I don't have to like it.

... who received a Plain English Award on 8th December for their leaflet, The Menopause. The judges praised its straightforward language and “good use of lists, short sentences and good design.”

It isn’t the first time a Liverpool-based organisation has won such an award, either. We’re starting to make a habit of it. Hardly surprising, though. Liverpool has always been the home of... well, not so much plain speaking as poetically-expressed plain speaking.

I was on a bus recently and ‘accidentally’ overheard a conversation between two recently acquainted work colleagues, one a veteran, the other a relative newcomer to shaving. The longer-serving of the two was running through a list of co-workers to be wary of. “He’s an alright fella, like, but hardly lifts a finger... She’ll help you out, but she’ll never let you forget it...” That sort of thing. At the bottom of the list was an individual we should probably call John Smith for legal reasons. When the new recruit was asked if he’d had any dealings with Mr Smith, he replied that he wasn’t sure. To this, the veteran sourly intoned, “Oh, you’d know him if you’d met him. He’s a cross between a dickhead and another dickhead.”

Poetically-expressed plain speaking of the highest order. A little offensive, true, but surely, when all’s said and done, not as offensive as the following recipient of a 2009 Golden Bull Award from the Plain English Campaign. It’s from a contractors’ agreement published by Dublin Airport Authority. If you intend to read it aloud, you’d better have lungs like a pearl diver.

(c) Neither the execution and delivery by the Consultant of this Agreement nor the consummation by it of any of the transactions contemplated hereby, requires, with respect to it, the consent or approval of the giving of notice to, the registration, with the record or filing of any document with, or the taking of any other action in respect of any government authority, except such as are not yet required (as to which it has no reason to believe that the same will not be readily obtainable in the ordinary course of business upon due application therefore) or which have been duly obtained and are in full force and effect.

Now, that really is offensive.

Congratulations again to the Liverpool Health Promotion Service and long-live The Plain English Campaign and its founder, Chrissie Maher. A Liverpudlian, of course.

I don't know if you've tried 'Wordle' yet, the word cloud creation tool. It's free online here. I can't recommend it highly enough. For one thing, the little pieces of typographical art it randomly creates are really fantastic, a joy to behold. It can be quite addictive, too, so keep an eye on the time.

But Wordle is also a very useful tool for giving you an accurate and uniquely-vivid snapshot of the content of a particular web page or blog.

Take a look at the one I created from my own rss feed, below:



As you can see, the word 'content' jumps right out at you, followed by, amongst others, the words 'website', 'copy' and 'writers'. From my point of view that means I must be doing something right and this blog isn't just an accumulation of the inane ramblings of a hopeless logorrhoeic.

On which note, I think that's enough from me.

I’ve never actually had writer’s block. Thankfully. I’ve never once found myself staring at a blank piece of paper or a winking cursor thinking, What to write? What to write?

What’s my secret? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe I’m just lucky.
Or maybe I’ve just been lucky so far. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow sans nouns, verbs, adjectives...

I say I’ve never experienced writer’s block, but I suppose that isn’t completely true. I do occasionally experience a vague sense that I’m running out of momentum and that if I lose said momentum I could find myself in a bit of trouble. And I do have a tried and tested strategy which helps me retain my momentum and, more often than not, gain a little more into the bargain.

So, here it is: my writer’s block inoculation. It won’t hurt a bit.

My default writing method is straight onto the screen of my trusty laptop or, if I’m out and about, my less-trusty but reasonably-dependable PDA. It’s quick, easy and you get a very immediate feel for how the work is going to look (which is surprisingly important for commercial writing, particularly when you’re creating something for online media). Plus you’ve got all those wonderful tools to hand, spellcheckers, word counters, cut-and-paste etc. Tap-tapping away at a keyboard, I’ve been known to produce around 5,000 words of ready-to-upload original, relevant and compelling content in a single day.

So, yes, it’s the keyboard for me every time.

But as soon as I get an inkling that I’m running out of momentum, I pick up a pad and pen. Right away. Even in mid-sentence. The pen is always a black medium Zebra Z-Grip and the pad is usually a 13x21cm Moleskine notebook (or a 9x14cm Moleskine pocket notebook if I’m in transit). I don’t know if these details matter, but writers are creatures of habit (Nabakov always wrote standing up, Capote always lying down), so perhaps it’s relevant.

Anyway, the point is I swap writing mediums immediately. After 20 minutes or so, that impending sense of lost momentum fades away, at which point I go back to the keyboard and type up my handwritten work right from the point where I left off.

It works for me every time. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t really know why. My theory is that writing directly onto the screen is so easy that my subconscious somehow predicts that I might lose interest and begins to transmit these weird little ‘potential momentum loss’ signals. By forcing myself to write by hand, a more ‘difficult’ method, I fend off disinterest and everything keeps flowing. It is just a theory, though.

As a commercial writer, I can’t help but be a little thankful for the very existence of writer’s block. I mean, I have every sympathy for those writers who are plagued by this dreaded phenomenon, but, on the plus side, it does thin the herd...

Recently, I had a discussion with a very bright and tech-savvy web developer associate of mine about the definition of ‘content’.

He maintained that anything that appears on a website is ‘content’.

And he’s right... technically.

Photographs are content, graphics are content, your product descriptions are content, even the little hit counter at the bottom of the page that used to be worn as a badge of honour but nobody takes any notice of anymore is content. If you log-in to any worth-its-salt Content Management System, you’ll be able to edit every element of your website with very little difficulty. And if a Content Management System allows you to edit every element of your website, then it stands to reason that content is, well practically everything.

But a definition that encompasses practically everything is no definition at all.

So, here’s my definition of content.

"Content is anything on your website that adds value from the customer’s perspective."

From the customer’s perspective.

If you have eighteen paragraphs telling your customer how wonderful your office removals business is (as a for-instance) and how you have three decades of experience planning and executing complex office relocation projects locally, nationally and internationally, that isn’t content. That’s copy. That’s promotional information designed to encourage your customer to invest in your business.

Don’t get me wrong, copy is an important element of any commercial website, but it’s not content. And content is an indispensible element of any commercial website.

If you have eighteen paragraphs telling your customer how to ascertain whether or not it’s time for them to consider an office relocation, that’s content. If you have eighteen paragraphs telling your customer how to prepare for an office relocation, that’s content. If you have eighteen paragraphs telling your customer how to reduce stock and inventory levels in the lead-up to an office relocation, and so controlling costs, that’s content.

Content gives something to the customer. What’s more, content gives something to the customer for nothing. It adds value to your website, from the customer’s perspective.

A content-rich website offers customers (and, of course, potential customers) a reason to visit your site. Particularly if you provide this value-added content on a regular basis. Other websites link to content-rich websites, boosting your page rank, and so improving your Google SERPS performance.  In addition, these freely-volunteered back-links are like highways to your business, highways that cut right through all the white noise and interference of the internet. Just as any ‘real world’ business requires a sturdy and flexible transport infrastructure, so does your website. Content gives you that sturdy and flexible transport infrastructure.

Creating a content –rich website is surprisingly inexpensive. A 400-word blog three times a week, a downloadable PDF fact-sheet once a month, and you’re well on your way to creating something that will attract swathes of new customers and ensure your existing customers have a positive experience every time they visit your website.

Just thought I’d share a piece entitled ‘Olives Don’t Taste Pretty’, which I wrote for last year’s ‘Stories from the City’ anthology (still in print: ISBN Number: 978-0-9560557-3).

The book was intended as a kind of reaction to the understandably-excessive hype surrounding the ‘European Capital of Culture’ bandwagon.

Award-winning, Liverpool-born author, Niall Griffiths said, “Stories from the City is an antidote to the avalanche of self-congratulatory crap that the city has produced in its Capital of Culture year. The writers within are interested in the only questions that matter: how we got to be here, in this place, at this time, and what it means to be alive in this city on this earth. Read, think, support. Liverpool needs work like this; it always has and always will. That there are people willing, even eager, to take such risks is to be praised.”

And Paul Du Noyer, Associate Editor of The Word, former editor of Q and Mojo, said, “A great book and a celebration of Liverpool’s greatest natural asset, namely language. This city loves words – we cherish them like connoisseurs and spend them like drunken sailors.”


Olives Don’t Taste Pretty

My Nana was always a little bit wary of excessive enthusiasm. “Careful you don’t lick the pattern off the plate,” she’d say to whoever happened to be enthusing at the time. When I was a child, I had only the vaguest idea of what it was she meant, and I think that had more to do with the way she intoned the remark (there was a sort of “Whoa, there, little horsey!” quality to it) and less to do with the actual semantics of the thing. It’s an expression that normally enters my head whenever I’m confronted with any form of overt salesmanship or borderline fanaticism. Last week was the first time it leapt into my forebrain in response to a building.

The building in question was the Futurist cinema on Lime Street. Well, what used to be the Futurist cinema on Lime Street; I’m not sure what function, if any, it performs today. I’m not particularly clued-up when it comes to architecture, so I’ll hedge my bets and describe the old cinema as “sort of Art Deco-ish”. I can’t imagine there are many Liverpudlians who haven’t seen it, situated as it is close to Lime Street Station and passed by (at a guess) a hundred or more buses each day and enough cars to give an environmentalist a week’s supply of nightmares. In its prime, I don’t doubt that the Futurist was a handsome sight: white, polished and gleaming; crisp, clean curves; sharp, precise angles. Today, it is in decline. Shabby, grubby and crumbling. Dishevelled.

Now, you might think I’m going to launch into a “Save the Futurist” tirade, liberally sprinkled with words like ‘heritage’, ‘preservation’ and, quite possibly, ‘outraged’. But I’m not. I like this sort of Art Deco-ish building just the way it is. I like its cracks and stains, its guano streaks and broken windows. I find it compelling. My fear isn’t that the Futurist will continue to decline but that some excessively-enthusiastic individual might take it upon themselves to renovate it, to blast away all that beguiling detail with an industrial strength pressure washer and leave behind something undeniably handsome, but no longer compelling.

Maybe it’s just me (actually, it’s very likely that it is just me) but I love the sight of things that are a little worse for wear. A brand new statue is generally a dreary thing until Liverpool’s Pigeon and Seagull Alliance has added its own splash of character. Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ didn’t really catch my eye until it had become thoroughly barnacled. The Superlambanana wasn’t much more than a mildly amusing novelty until the city’s Banksy-wannabes had subjected it to a bit of spontaneous criticism (but some well-meaning Council employee would always come along and scrub it back down to novelty once more). There might be any number of niche websites for people like me, but I daren’t investigate (I’m not all that eager to find out what kind of people share my little personality quirk).

Liverpool is currently undergoing what must be one of the world’s largest urban renewal projects (wars and natural disasters aside, of course). It’s a very exciting time. All those cranes and scaffolds: it makes me think of early Twentieth Century New York and that old photograph of a gang of construction workers calmly eating their sandwiches suspended on a girder hundreds of feet above the city. Despite my niche-website quirk, I love all this change, all this newness. I’m just worried that in our enthusiasm for renewal, we might just end up licking the pattern off the plate.

“An ugly beauty was my own invention,” Ian McCulloch claimed. I’m not sure it was his invention (Mac is liable to claim he invented pretty much everything: rock and roll, hair lacquer, finger quotes...) but it’s an interesting idea. The conventional notion of beauty has a good deal more to do with prettiness and niceness, I think, than actual beauty. Actual beauty can incorporate ugliness. Actual beauty is augmented by ugliness. Actual beauty, I suspect, requires ugliness.

When I was twelve-years old, I was mugged at trowel-point. I was walking down Wellington Road toward Smithdown Road and I’d just passed under the bridges, when a voice behind me said, “Empty your fucking pockets or I’ll fucking stab you.” I turned to see a boy not much older than me, taller, skinnier, ginger hair and in need of a wash. His eyes were a little wild. He was holding a trowel, shiny and new. He was wearing the uniform of Paddington Comp. They had a reputation. “I haven’t got any money,” I squeaked. Which was true. He brought the tip of his trowel up to my right eye and held it steadily about a centimetre away. “Don’t fucking lie,” he said and shoved his hands into my pockets. Finding only a used tissue and a scrunched up bus ticket, he seemed at a loss for a few seconds. Then, he said, “What do you think of me trowel?” He proceeded to tell me all about his trowel, as we walked the rest of the way down Wellington Road. He’d made it himself in woodwork and metalwork. He was inordinately proud (and rightly so: it was an excellent trowel). We parted on reasonable terms.

I like that this incident happened to me. It was ugly, no doubt about that. But, at the same time, it was exciting and interesting, compelling. Not everything has to be nice, be it an incident or a building or, indeed, an entire city.

Put another way: olives don’t taste pretty. They’re pungent, a little bitter. They taste wrong. They taste ugly. They taste beautiful. People who eat olives, love olives. There’s no such thing as a take-it-or-leave-it, casual olive eater. People who eat olives say things like, “Please, I’m begging you, take the jar off me or I’ll eat them all and who cares about my above-average cholesterol?”

Not everything has to be pretty. Not every building has to be renewed, renovated, scrubbed and cleaned. Some buildings are like olives. They’re not pretty but they are beautiful.

Careful you don’t lick the pattern off the plate, as my Nana used to say.

I should, for the sake of balance, mention my Nana’s other regularly broadcast expression:

“Never trust anybody with a big head and a small face.”

It’s probably wise to take these things with a pinch of salt.

A recent study by the Nielson Norman Group has indicated that internet users read web copy extremely quickly and in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal bars followed by a single downward stripe.

Before I go into the specifics, let's just take a moment to consider the implications of this for the copywriter. Firstly, people do not read online information in the same way that they read printed information. Therefore, as a copywriter, you cannot approach web copy in the same way as you would approach copy for other media. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the internet user does not read all of your copy, but a specific portion of it. The implication here is obvious: you can't place your important information just anywhere on the page; if you do, there's a very real danger that it won't be read at all and all your otherwise-dazzling copywriting will be left floating ineffectually through the depths of cyberspace.

The Neilson Norman study used cameras and infrared emitters to track the eye movements of 232 users reading thousands of web pages. The results gave a strong indication that an F-shaped reading pattern predominates. The internet user will read the majority or all of the first paragraph. This forms the top bar of the F-shape. They then move down and read the second paragraph, though rarely as thoroughly as the first. This forms the second, lower bar of the F-shape. They then (and this is the really crucial part) simply scan down the left-hand side of the page. This forms the downward bar of the F-shape.

This means that as a copywriter, particularly an online copywriter or SEO copywriter, it is vital that you put your most important information in your first paragraph. No teasing, no gradual build-up, no taking your reader gently by the hand. Instead, wham, give them a big dose of copywriter magic right from the outset. Your second paragraph can contain any qualifying information and any information that is important but not necessarily vital. After that, you need to be looking at bullet points or lots of small paragraphs with strong headings, with all your key product benefits leading in from the left.

In some respects (certainly in regard to the first two paragraphs), it's not unlike writing copy for a press release (a comparison which, depending on the copywriter, will either be greeted as a challenge or with a growing sense of alarm). Interestingly, the bullet structure, which conforms to the downward stripe of the F-shape, is relatively common on many otherwise-amateurish websites, websites that have clearly not had the benefit of input from a copywriter. It's as if, intuitively, many people have grasped how we read web content and adopted an approach that loosely appeals to the F-shaped reading pattern. Hard as it may be, you may have to swallow that copywriter pride and study how the layman does it.

I would strongly advise against trying to write copy to an F-shaped pattern (I've tried it and it gave me a headache). Instead keep the F-shaped pattern in mind when rewriting and editing your copy. You can't change human nature, but, as a copywriter, you can change your writing.