Month: October 2020

29 Quotes That Perfectly Explain What Copywriting Means

If you’re not sure what copywriting means, start here:
Copy is the words businesses and people use to sell something.
And copywriting is salesmanship in print.
The Short Version:

Copywriting moves people to action
Copywriting is a conversation between you and one person
It isn’t creative – it’s about selling and making a new “control”
It sells outcomes and value, not products or prices
Copy is the name for the words you write
When you write copy, you are a copywriter

As John McIntyre puts it:

“Copywriting is using words to persuade people to take some kind of action,

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Smart Data Visualizations: Quality Assessment Algorithm

The gap between a bad and good data visualization is small.
The gap between a good and great data visualization is a vast chasm!
The challenge is that we, and our HiPPOs, bring opinions and feelings and our perceptions of what will go viral to the conversation. This is entirely counter productive to distinguishing between bad, good, and great.
What we need instead is a rock solid understanding of the updraft we face in our quest for greatness, and a standard framework that can help us dispassionately assess quality.
Let’s do that today. Learn how to seperate bad from good and good from great, and do so using examples that we can all relate to instantly.
We’ll start by looking at the two sets of humans who are at the root of the conflict of obsessions and then learn to assess how effective any data visualization is in an entirely new way. If you adopt it, I guarantee the impact on your work will be transformative.
The Conflict of Obsessions.
There are two parties involved in any data visualization.
1. Analyst/Data Visualizer. As I’ve passionately shared frequently on this blog, we, Analysts, are all in the business of persuasion. We work against that desired outcome because when we work on creating a data visualization, here are our top-of-mind concerns/desires/perspectives:

How can I cram as much as I can into the graphic?
What can I include to ensure everyone clearly gets just how much work I did?
How much of my agenda do I need to make overt, and how much can I make covert?
Is there something I can add to increase the chances that this will go viral and result in fame and glory?

Ok. I’m only teasing.
But, as an

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