A UK supermarket named Morrisons became the target of Internet bullying yesterday after shoppers tweeted photos of a bizarre item on sale there.
“This is the most wretched and cursed item I have ever witnessed,” one person wrote.
The item in question is a purse-sized plastic bag of hard-boiled, peeled eggs, swimming in a preservative liquid. Each bag says it has only 5 eggs, but actually has more than 40 — and you can catch ’em all for just 1 GBP.
Morissons tried to joke away the sacks of wet eggs on its shelves. But what can you say? The bags look wretched and cursed. No amount of twitter fiddling can fix that.
These days, along with the Daily Mail, where I read the above story, I’m also re-reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.
One idea that Zinsser beats into your head is that “writing is rewriting.”
No. I don’t agree.
You can rewrite to make your writing tighter… to clean it up… to do away with cliches or vague words.
But if you start out with a sack of wet eggs, no amount of rewriting will get you a final product that’s anything but wretched and cursed.
You have to have something to say at the start. And more importantly, you have to have the right mood to sell it. Matt Furey, who pretty much invented the daily email format, put it this way:
“It isn’t just the words that do the selling. It’s the emotion behind the words. Remove the emotion and you don’t have great copy. So it makes sense to me that you spend as much time learning how to raise your level of vibration as you do learning marketing and copywriting strategies.”
Speaking of daily emails:
I’ve got an email newsletter, and I email daily. No cursed or wretched items here though. At Bejakovic supermarket, we make sure all our emails are fresh and appetizing. If you’d like to try a sample, you can sign up here.