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'The AdWeek Copywriting Handbook' -- Thom Hartmann's "Independent Thinker" Book of the Month Review

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 04/02/2007 - 6:28am.

THOM HARTMANN'S "INDEPENDENT THINKER" BOOK OF THE MONTH REVIEW

The AdWeek Copywriting Handbook
by Joseph Sugarman, reviewed by Thom Hartmann

Want to use the written word -- from a blog to email to articles to op-eds to pretty much any written format you can imagine -- to change the world? Joe Sugarman will teach you how.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I owe much of the quality of the life I currently have to Joe Sugarman.

Back in the mid-1970s, he was one of America's most famous advertising copywriters and I was a twenty-something partner in a small Michigan advertising agency. I attended a workshop that Joe taught, and it quite literally changed my life. Joe gave me my first real keys to the kingdom of communication, and I've made a living using them ever since.

While the passage of 30-some years since that time has dimmed my memory of when and where I was listening to Joe, I remember well many of his lessons. One of the first was to understand that good advertising copy is one of the most elegant forms of communication. It's designed to produce a change in a person's thinking and, most importantly, an immediate change in their behavior.

The same is true of the most effective political writing, whether it be that of Karl Marx, Barry Goldwater, or conservative strategist Richard Viguerie (who was also a student of Joe's).

I remember Joe telling us that the most common mistake of writers of all stripes (particularly advertising copywriters) is thinking that they're writing to an audience. He said that when writing copy, one should imagine a person you know, who you like, and who would be interested in the topic (product) of your writing. And then write it as a letter, even if you have to insert a personal preamble that you later delete.

I've used (and advocated) his technique for years, writing everything from advertising copy for some of America's largest corporations, to strategic communications, to hundreds of published articles and 19 books currently in print.

You can find the essence of Joe's advice about writing in a personal way in Chapter 15 of his book The AdWeek Copywriting Handbook. But that's just the beginning. And even though Joe's book is entirely about marketing and advertising copy, the lessons are important -- crucial -- for political activists.

Political persuasion is simply a variation on commercial persuasion (assuming that historically the latter preceded the former). The tools that make you a good marketer are the tools that work in politics as well.

In that context, The AdWeek Copywriting Handbook is one of the most valuable tools political activists will ever encounter.

In doing research and show-prep for my daily talk radio show, I encounter lousy political communication at least a half-dozen to a dozen times a day. Activists who don't know how to condense what they're saying into an easily-understood form. Activists who bury the lede. Activists who try to "sell" the details of policies rather than their benefits.

If you want to know how to be an effective communicator in print -- from writing letters to members of Congress to writing posters for the upcoming march to writing your blog -- Joe Sugarman is the man to teach you. Just mentally transform his "sales and marketing" examples into political examples -- it's surprisingly easy -- and you'll be brilliant.

As odd and offbeat as it may seem, Joe Sugarman's AdWeek Copywriting Handbook should be in the library of every political activist (and already is in those of many conservatives, starting with Viguerie). Learn what they know -- buy it now!

THOM HARTMANN'S "INDEPENDENT THINKER" BOOK OF THE MONTH REVIEW

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Words That Can Change The World

Submitted by crackerjack on Mon, 04/02/2007 - 7:54pm.

Where the popular response to one's words turns out to be "Hey, that speaks for me."

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KARL ROVE

Submitted by RenoMike on Mon, 04/02/2007 - 10:20am.

The Price Writes

Get real. George Bush doesn’t run this country any more that Mickey Mouse runs Disney.

By now, anyone who isn't brain-dead recognized the ineluctable truth that its Karl Rove, with the occasional bizarre assistance of Dick Chaney, who controls George Bush, the White House, the United States Congress, the Justice Department, Bush’s totally corrupt administration, Fox News, and, by extension, the policies and activities of the government of the Unites States.

See how well it works when a pair of draft dodgers run the store?

Rove’s admirers refer to him as, “brilliant,” and a “genius.” These admirers are, of course, the same party-line lock-step automatons that also refer to the smirking parasite currently occupying the Oval Office as, “our heroic leader.”

At best, Rove is only just smart enough to fool a gullible and lazy national media into believing he's anything more than a trusted hanger-on. It is his adoring toadies, themselves collectively no brighter than a carload of slaughterhouse-bound cattle, who confuse Rove’s larcenous duplicity with genuine intelligence.

The good news for this country is the two fatal flaws to which Karl Rove must inevitably succumb, and which will inevitably destroy him. First is his insatiable greed for power. Magnified by his position, and enabled by the laziness and stupidity of the president of the United States, Rove’s power continues to grow despite the recent - and, sadly, temporary – scandal in which he is currently embroiled.

Second is Karl Rove’s legendary, out-of-control ego. George Bush’s, “spiritual guide,” cannot tolerate even the slightest suggestion of fallibility, and thus protects his image of super-intelligence by relentlessly reinforcing the unprecedented secretiveness of the White House he so completely dominates.

A stunning example of Rove’s ego-driven imbalance is demonstrated by his reckless outing of Valerie Plame, the former covert CIA agent. Endangering not only her life, but the lives of literally dozens of other courageous and loyal American CIA operatives, Rove’s childish vengeance was simply no more than an act of intimidation against her husband, ambassador Joe Wilson, for uncovering the fact that George Bush used a Rove-approved forged intelligence report as a basis to lie to the American people. Clearly, America’s true national security took a distant second place to Karl Rove’s compulsive need for secrecy and total control.

In a war as illegitimate as the appointment of George W. Bush to this tragic presidency, well over thirty-two hundred brave American lives have been sacrificed to the Rove-Chaney cabal’s greedy lust for power and money and oil, more oil, more oil… And over twenty-four thousand less well-connected Americans have been maimed for life. Countless families have been destroyed. But to Karl Rove, Dick Chaney and George Bush, those Americans are of little consequence. Pawns, not people.

Remember it? Thanks to the cooperation of a handful of well-trained Saudi stooges, a nightmare occurred where more than three thousand victims (mostly Jews and foreigners and certainly few, if any, Born-again Christians) perished in the worst crime in America’s history.

I believe with my heart and gut that on that horrific morning of 9-11, alone and safe behind the locked door of his sumptuous White House office, Karl Rove danced.

Mike Price
March 31, 2007

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