How to write good copy? Here are 3 tips for you!

To write copy with a sense of picture, you can first understand the five senses, which refer to form, sound, smell, taste, and touch, that is, the five sensory organs of human beings: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

Vision is the basis for us to construct pictures. Designers can create the shape and color of things through the application of colors, lines, and graphics. So how can copywriters mobilize the "five senses" to write copy that is both visual and vivid?

Next, we will go to historical masterpieces to learn how to use copywriting to mobilize the reader's five senses of vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch to create vivid pictures.

1. Visualization tool - concrete nouns to build basic pictures

When we describe people or things, we like to use adjectives to express our feelings. For example, when describing whether a baked sweet potato is delicious or not, some people are simple and rough, while others are observant.

• A said: Baked sweet potatoes don’t look good but they are super delicious
• B said: The roasted sweet potatoes are black and full of grass ash, but they are sweet like honey.

If you are talking to A, maybe you have no desire for sweet potatoes, or you will say: How can it be delicious? Is it sweet? Everyone has a different understanding of "super delicious". Some people think delicious means sweet, fragrant, or soft and sticky. You will confirm again whether what he called "super delicious" is the same as you expected.

If you are talking to B, you might say: This is the same roasted sweet potato I ate when I was a child. The sweet potato taken out of the cave is very sweet. The second one can evoke people's memories because it uses specific nouns, conveys more accurate information, and reduces the time users spend thinking about building pictures.

The authors of famous ancient works were well aware of this principle, and used a large number of specific nouns to construct pictures and convey their emotions and ideas.

For example, Wang Wei's "Autumn Night in the Mountain":

After the rain in the empty mountains, autumn begins late.

The bright moon shines among the pines, and the clear spring flows over the rocks.

The bamboos rustle with the sound of returning washerwomen, and the lotus leaves sway with the sound of fishing boats.

Let the spring flowers fade as they please, and the prince can stay.

This poem describes the scene of an autumn evening after the rain. The bright moon casts mottled shadows through the pine forest, and clear springs flow gently over the boulders. Through the use of nouns such as "bright moon between pines", "clear spring" and "empty mountain", the time, scene, characters and feelings are explained, creating a picture of a peaceful and tranquil time.

The use of nouns is to construct a more accurate picture, and the use of verbs is to enhance the sense of movement for the picture. The poem uses the verbs "shine", "flow" and "fishing boat" to enhance the vitality of still life scenes such as "green pine" and "spring water", making the entire autumn scenery after the rain more vivid.

Another example is Song Qi's "Yulouchun":

The scenery in East City is gradually becoming more beautiful. Rippled waves welcome the guests. The morning chill is light beyond the green willows, and the spring is bustling on the branches of red apricots.

The greater regret is that there is little joy in this life. Willing to love a thousand gold with a smile. I hold wine for you to toast the setting sun, and let its evening glow remain among the flowers.

The use of the verb "nao" makes the whole picture lively and brightens the reader's eyes.

The use of nouns and verbs can quickly construct pictures, and the brain will have the ability to associate and relate to create more content pictures.

But in marketing , this alone is not enough. The important purpose of commercial copywriting is to influence the minds of consumers. Therefore, when describing a product, consumers should not only receive a factual picture, but also create vivid memory points. When needed, the brain will be immediately mobilized to generate consumption. So in addition to basic visual images, we also need to mobilize other human senses.

2. Add a voice to make the copy more three-dimensional

Sound belongs to the sense of hearing, and is colorless and tasteless. In addition to using words such as "pleasant to the ears" and "soft voice", when describing the copy, we can also describe the sound by describing the sound with the sound and describing the sound with the shape, so as to make the picture constructed by the copy more three-dimensional.

First, let’s look at the passage in Bai Juyi’s “Pipa Xing” that describes the sound of the pipa:

The sound of the big strings is as loud as heavy rain, while the sound of the small strings is as soft as whispers.

The sounds of the strings are mixed together, and pearls, big and small, fall on a jade plate.

The oriole's song is slippery under the flowers, and the gurgling spring is difficult to flow under the ice.

The ice spring is cold and the strings are frozen, and the sound stops temporarily.

There is a secret sorrow and hidden hatred, and at this time silence is better than sound.

The silver bottle broke and water splashed out, and the iron cavalry rushed out with swords and guns ringing.

At the end of the song, the plucked strings sound like tearing silk.

This passage uses a series of metaphors to describe the rise and fall of sounds vividly, as if you were listening to it live. The fast and slow sounds of the pipa are likened to the large and small beads falling on a jade plate, the intermittent oriole chirping represents the lingering flow of music, and the flowing water of a deep spring represents the delicateness of music. The music that is sometimes sad, sometimes soothing, and sometimes clear is all before your eyes.

One feature of this method of writing about sound is to use a familiar sound to describe another sound, thereby evoking the reader's memory, thus achieving the desired effect.

Describing sound with shape

What impressed me most was Lu Xun's "Listening to the Tide":

The sea is mumbling at our feet, like a poet. The sound seemed as gentle as the hazy moonlight and the rose morning mist; as mellow as the sweet words of a lover; low and light, like the breeze blowing across the strings of a harp; like fallen flowers floating on the water.

The sea is fast asleep.

…

The sea finally got angry. It attacked with a roar, rushed towards the shore violently, rushed into the crevices of the rocks, and scratched the rock barriers. The sound gets louder. The sounds of war drums, gongs, shouts, calls, cries, horse hooves, wheels, and plane wings mixed together, like a battle between thousands of troops.

This method of describing sound through form is to use tangible objects to describe invisible sounds and enhance the sense of picture. In this article, Lu Xun describes the murmuring sound of the sea, expressing it with hazy moonlight, morning mist and breeze, stimulating the reader's association between the two. The image of the sleeping sea at night jumps onto the paper.

3. Metaphor makes copywriting easier to read

When it comes to describing the three senses of taste, smell, and touch, everyone has a different understanding. For example, how sweet are roasted sweet potatoes? Is the fragrance strong or light? If you want readers to clearly feel your state of mind, you might as well try using metaphors to add some spice to the copy and connect originally unrelated things together. "Similar" things can greatly arouse readers' imagination.

The most important thing about metaphor is to have a clear understanding of the subject, the object, and the metaphorical word. Take taste for example. The most basic tastes are sweet, sour, bitter, salty and spicy. Then we need to find metaphors corresponding to these five entities. It is best if this metaphor is familiar to everyone and has a deep perception of it. For example, sweet reminds us of first love, sour may remind us of bayberry, bitter may remind us of traditional Chinese medicine, and salty may remind us of salty duck eggs. Then we can make analogies, which will arouse consumers' cognition. The folk copywriting "Sweeter than first love" is an excellent example. There is also Yang Wanli's description of the sourness of plums: "The sour plums splash on teeth, and the green banana leaves are spread on the window screen." The sourness of the plums penetrates the teeth, and we can immediately imagine the scene in our imagination.

The same method can be used for smell and touch, so I won’t go into details here.

Our creation of the five senses in copywriting is mainly to transform the senses into illusions and imaginations of the brain, and to use words to paint a vivid picture in the user's mind, rather than a bunch of beautiful adjectives that make people forget who is who after reading them.

Below is how Xiao Mushroom constructs a picture of roasted sweet potatoes by using concrete nouns, describing sounds with sounds, and using metaphors. It is better to write it once than to read it ten times. Welcome everyone to practice writing together.

The sweet potato taken out from the green ash was covered with grass ash. After being baked at high temperature, it was smaller than before and traces of burnt skin could be seen. There was no time to wait for them to get cold, so I patted the hot sweet potatoes with my hands and broke them open. I heard the skin cracking slightly, and then hot air burst into the air. In the thin mist, I saw the sweet potato flesh as golden as egg yolk. There was a stream of crystal honey between the sweet potato flesh and the skin. The honey dripped down the skin into the flames, making a sound like the sound of a breeze blowing through the pine forest, and then the flames became stronger.

This article was compiled and published by @小菇在跑 (Qinggua Media) by the author @小菇在跑. Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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