is the modulated verse of Wordsworth's poem that we frequently hear this form spoken of as the Romantic Ode. I believe that modulated verse, the offshoot of the Irregular Ode, is destined to a distinguished future in English prosody. It is a boon to those who have found the set stanzaic forms too rigid for freedom of expression, thus legitimately providing to poetry a new scope which the broken prose cadence known as free verse can never legitimately supply. It should be noted, however, that a thorough mastery of the set forms is prerequisite to the mastery of this more flexible technique, for they alone can train the ear to detect flaws in the music, and the mind to exercise that proper economy which forbids prolixity. In modulated verse we divide our poem according to the division of thought, we vary our line length according to the amount of content, and we insert our rhymes wherever they most musically and naturally fall. Our modulations from one line length or metre to another must be smooth, and similar rhyme sounds must not be separated by more than four lines, for in longer intervals the sound is lost. Modulated verse may be used very effectively in a short poem, such as Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world which seems This magnificent poem illustrates well the power of modulated verse in a fairly short passage. I venture to prophesy that variety and brilliance of the form will be even more effective in overcoming the monotony and heaviness which are too apt to mar longer compositions. Can a Writer Write Advertising? By EARNEST ELMO CALKINS LEADER in the advertising profession, favorite contributor ANY a writer is beginning to look specu latively at advertising writing and wonder if he cannot do it. He hears of the large sums earned by advertising men, and he reads the copy they write in the advertisements, and it seems to him that the work is not beyond his powers, and that the income is larger and more certain than the one he is accustomed to. an ap great deal about the kind of goods he is going The professional advertising man is often called upon to explain the difference between writing and writing advertising. The explanation is both simple and complex. Simply, it is that advertising must be written by an advertising man. A writer, an author, that is, goes through a long apprenticeship before he can write well whatever it is that he does write essay, sonnet, short story prenticeship to life, it may be, if he interprets life. The advertising man also serves a long apprenticeship during which he becomes an advertising man, and incidentally a writer of advertising- incidentally, for the writing of copy is only a part of his work, an important part, but still a part. Before he can write a successful advertisement he must have acquired somehow a vivid picture of the commercial world. He must be at home in it, so that he can move naturally and easily, without knocking things over. He must know something about business in general, how it is carried on, how goods are made and sold, through what channels they flow from the factories through the shops to the people. He must have the merchandising instinct strongly developed, the desire to sell. He must know a month, until the puzzle picture begins to come together in some sort of coherent shape. If he has acquired such a mental equipment, and in addition knows how to write, how to choose words and use them, sharp pointed words that penetrate instead of round words that roll off, how to be simple and easily understood without becoming trite or commonplace, how to be natural, sincere, and convincing in a very small space, then he will be able to write copy that will sell. So it will be seen that a writer as such is not qualified to write advertising until, starting with his equipment of knowing how to write, he is willing to go to school, for three or four years, learning how things are done in the business world, during which time his earnings will be very much less than he is now making as a writer. There is no more and no less reason why a writer should do this than a man in any other occupation. The writer as such is no nearer advertising than the salesman, the lawyer, or the shipping clerk. Any man, even though an indifferent writer, who starts with a natural instinct for selling goods, coupled with creative power and imagination, is nearer the goal of advertising proficiency than the writer who also has creative power and imagination but lacks the commercial instinct, which so many writers do lack. The first must learn to write; the other must learn to sell. Which is the harder depends on the individual. a matter of adding one set of skills to another. As a rule the writer is farther from the advertising point of view than the man with a more commercial origin. Writers look upon business with a patronizing tolerance or an active hostility. Certainly no man is going to be a successful writer of copy to sell goods who condescends to his work. The artist went through the same stages. Time was when the real artist did advertising with his left hand as a temporary expedient. It was not believed that an artist of the first rank would ever come to look upon commercial art as an end in itself worthy of his highest and best effort. But that time has come. The elder race of artists at last realized that business art was a field in itself, as dignified and deserving of their best effort as any other form of applied art. But especially there has arisen a new generation of artists to whom such work is as much their metier as religious work was to the artists of the fifteenth century. Advertising wants the individuality of the artist, wants him to express himself in his work, but along the lines of the required problem or message or interpretation. That it can be done is proved constantly in the advertising pages of periodicals, and on the walls of the Art Center galleries, where designs and pictures made to sell goods are revealed and reviewed, within their limits, as art. The artist's relation to advertising does not entirely parallel that of the writer. Most advertising is written by advertising men, not writers, but advertising art is produced by artists rather than advertising men. This does not necessarily mean that the artist's skill is harder to acquire than the writer's, but rather perhaps that the art side of advertising is still a little more detachable, or at least detached, than the writing side. The writer must be a part of the machine, a member of the organization. There are so many things he must learn for himself that can be given to the artist in workable form. The artist can be commissioned with an idea and go back to his studio and work it out. The copy has its roots so deep in other activities which must There is an analogy in another art that serves advertising. The artist who paints portraits or landscapes or illustrates books may wonder why he cannot do advertising work. He can if he is willing to learn, but he is not an advertising artist because he is able to draw. It all depends on knowing on what subject to expend one's ability to write or draw. And that knowledge is part of the equipment of the advertising man. The same rules apply to the professor of statistics, or economics, or psychology, or sociology. All these sciences have a place in modern business, but to apply them their possessors must learn the facts about the business world. It is be accessible for inspiration and information, that the writer must be closer to his job. As it happens, I have been watching with considerable interest the transformation of a writer into an advertising man. As a writer he is good. His work is welcomed by magazines which make a specialty of literature. He has a wide vocabulary and great felicity of expression, a good education, and familiarity with literature. But advertising was a closed book to him. The advertisements that he wrote at first were good; well written, readable, and sensible, but they were not advertisements. They lacked something. What it was they lacked I am unable to tell you. They had an air of strangeness. They smacked of the cloister rather than the marketplace. It was not that the writing was too good. It could n't be too good. But the advertisements just did not fit. And then, after several years of work he got it. But what he got also defies definition. It is something like golf, made up of an infinite number of small things to do or not to do, the sum total of which is golf style. It is very much like writing in other fields, I imagine. It is difficult to say exactly what makes this or that a good novel, or play, or lyric. The writer's familiarity with his technique, the reservoir from which he draws his ideas, his imagination, vocabulary, knowledge of the psychology of his readers, all help, probably unconsciously, to lead him to write as he does. Writing advertising copy becomes unconscious in this sense, that the writer who can write it, writes it, just as the good golfer makes his stroke, without being entirely aware how or why he does it. But that result is the cumulative effect of repeated experience. Advertising requires the best writing ability that it can command. Good writing is never a drawback. It is always an advantage. But all this ability to write, this sense of the real meaning of words, this knack of expressing the thing by vivid phrase, is wasted without a right conception of what an advertisement is, what its place is, what it has to do. The whole business of a writer becoming an advertising man consists of learning how to turn the skill he already has into a new and unaccustomed channel. This matter was given a new aspect when several really famous authors took up writing advertising in a serious way. Just how serious was the way may be inferred from the offer by a literary agency of quite a list of stars whose services were thus made available to the needs of commerce. The list included such names as Rex Beach, Gellett Burgess, Ellis Parker Butler, Irvin S. Cobb, Nina Wilcox Putnam, Grantland Rice and Carolyn Wells. Commerce, however, failed to appreciate its opportunity, or at least to take advantage of it, for so far I have seen the efforts of only two well-known writers, Will Rogers and Irvin Cobb. Both these men wrote advertisements for tobacco, and their advertisements were signed, giving more than a suspicion that it was the name rather than the copy they wrote that was desired. That was certainly true of Will Rogers. He appeared in the advertising columns exactly as he appears on the stage. What he wrote had nothing to do with the article advertised. Irvin Cobb's copy was better advertising. He uses tobacco, for one thing, while Rogers does not. He knew something about tobacco, was brought up on it in fact. Also he is a much better writer than Rogers. What Cobb wrote about Sweet Caporal was more nearly advertising than what Rogers wrote about Bull Durham. But these two experiments leave the question evactly where it was before. It is doubtful if Irvin Cobb could write equally good advertising copy about any other product, or at least doubtful if he would be willing to go through the preparatory study of another product. His knowledge of tobacco was a part of his inheritance. If any regular advertising writer wrote such bad copy as Will Rogers', he would be promptly discharged. Its only value, if it had any, was in Will Rogers' name. It had no more to do with selling Bull Durham than a radio concert by the Happiness Boys has to do with selling candy. Even so good a writer as Cobb has only his good writing to start with. He would need to go through the mill that grinds out the advertising man before he could write good selling copy about the many different products an advertising man is compelled to tackle every working day. A good rough and ready test of the seriousness with which a prospective copy writer regards advertising is one I often apply. How great is your interest in advertising? Do you read it as it appears in your magazines or newspapers, or turns up in the mails? Some of it is dull, I know, but not all of it. And if you are the stuff advertisement writers are made from, you should be interested in it whether good or bad. Perhaps some of it that seems dull to you is really good. At any rate, your interest in the subject is the pertinent factor. An advertisement, any advertisement, should be as absorbing to you as a new plant to a botanist, or a new fossil to a geologist. Young men and young women come to me and say they are deeply interested in advertising and want to do it. I ask them what they think of this or that campaign running in the magazines or newspapers, and find they have never noticed it or any other advertising. They have never looked with curious or inquiring interest at any piece of advertising. What would you think of a man who had never been interested in pictures deciding to study art? What I have tried to make clear is that ability to write is a desirable gift for an advertising man to have, but that ability to write must be supplemented by professional training, which training takes about as many years as are needed to produce an architect, doctor, or electrical engineer. And if ability to write is not included among the candidate's natural gifts, then he can learn that, too, along with the other things. The copy that fills advertising columns of magazines and newspapers is practically all written by advertising men. Those who have learned to write can often learn advertising, and those who know advertising frequently must learn to write, but the literary gift does not presuppose advertising ability of any kind. There is no real relation between them. Advertising is not a department of literature, though it uses many of literature's tools. It is a department of business. Those who are most successful in it are business-minded. To them the seemingly prosaic operations of producing, distributing, and selling goods are intrinsically interesting. I have received and answered so many letters from people who asked the question which heads this paper, or questions of similar import, that I wrote a book in self-defence which I intended as my complete and final answer to all those who wished to know whether or not they could do it. In this book ("The Advertising Man"; Scribner's) I summed up in a little catechism the mental traits which I felt promised success in advertising work: 1. Are you enthusiastic, curious, observant? 2. Can you write? 3. Can you spell, punctuate, paragraph, capitalize? 4. Are you interested in printing? Do you notice the different kinds of type, their size, arrangement, effect? Did you ever visit a printing office? 5. Are you interested in pictures? 6. Can you draw? 7. Are you handy with pencil? Can you make a map, a plan, or a diagram? Can you visualize things? 8. Have you ever visited a factory? Did it interest you? 9. Does a store interest you? Have you ever sold goods? 10. Do you like to read? 11. Do you remember what you read? 12. Are you interested in ways of saying things? Do you note unusual expressions? 13. Can you describe what you see? 14. Do you like to write letters? 15. Are you a good mixer? Do you like people? Can you get interested in talking to a man about his work? 16. Does advertising interest you? Do you notice window displays, billboards, advertisements, circulars? |