The more things change...

Yesterday, my daughter was 34. Tomorrow, my son will be 36. We don’t make a big deal of birthdays any more, but, as I imagine most parents do, I always find myself flipping through mental albums of my adult kids as children.

This year, that led me to a different retrospective—and thoughts about Web copywriting.

Sitting at my trusty Mac, writing to my son working in -35°F half a continent away, I flashed back to how I worked 30+ years ago.

In the early 70s, I was a copywriter at a large Toronto ad agency, and the emergence of the desktop PC as a ubiquitous business tool was still more than a decade away.

Email, and all the instant communications and capabilities we take for granted, were still the realm of science-fiction. The letter to my son—written long-hand or typed—would have gone via snail mail a week ago.

When I wrote copy in those days it was on an IBM Selectric™ typewriter, the one with the little “golf ball” that spun to present the correct character. We’d place carbon paper between several sheets of pristine 8½ x 11, wind them into the typewriter, type triple-spaced, make changes on the copies—then do it again and again until final draft was reached.

Sounds primitive, tedious... and, it was. White-out was invented for poor typists like me.

Then, around 1983, the breakthrough! I paid nearly $9000 for an Olympia™ word processor... a big brute, with an electronic typewriter for keyboard and printer. It used 5¼” soft disks, and had a whopping (for then) 360k memory.

That old girl is still in my basement—replaced, first, by a Mac Classic, and then various Mac evolutions up to my present 23” iMac.

In terms of speed, convenience and all-‘round efficiency, I can do things today that were a pipe dream when I started out. The tools of my trade have changed beyond recognition. All but one. We still work with words to get the client’s message out.

We write for a new medium but, just as earlier generations of copywriters learned to write for radio and then for television, today’s wordsmiths are learning (albeit slowly) to write for the Web. I say “slowly” because all the evidence on thousands of Web sites proves the point.

People who use the Web read very differently and, for all the practical ease of producing content, Web copywriting must adopt a style and on-page presentation that serves online reading habits.

I’ll take a look at those reading habits in my next post, and why Web writing in general is lagging behind its audience.