In this weeks Copy Conversations we discuss how to use criticism to boost your copy skills. It's good stuff.
(I use a robot for this so give me a break)
Hey this is Jody.
I just wanted to stop by really quick and have little copy conversation with you about using criticism to help improve your copywriting skills.
Back when I was in the military and learning to fly airplanes we used to use what was called a shit sandwich to critique people's flying efforts. Especially students.
It's not as bad as it sounds. Basically you give a compliment, tell them all the things they did wrong, and give them another complement. Because you know hours of the briefs were all you did was criticize be very painful.
So sometimes it's hard to take all the criticism if you have the wrong mindset. A lot of us kind of grew up with a very fixed mindset. And fixed mindsets tend to make us fear criticism. We feel like our intelligence is being questioned. That we can never improve. That can go internal.
I found early on when I was writing It was way too hard for me to accept criticism. But here's the thing about the military debrief and getting criticism on copy is we really don't have a lot of chances and a lot of time to focus on our works in getting good feedback.
This week I had the opportunity to have one of my emails critique by very high level copywriter and what I wanted to hear was "great Jody is the best thing ever this is awesome." But when I got back was, "hey this is pretty good. Here's a list of things you can do to improve it." A younger me would've taken that pretty hard but now I understand that the value of criticism.
They were high quality inputs that will allow me to make to create even better emails every time I write one. S
So it's really important to look at your criticisms far more than you know the kudos that you might get from other copywriters or people giving you critiques. Because sometimes we tend to discount those criticisms and usually there's at least some grain of truth in them.
If you really want to improve your copy and have the opportunity to get critiques then you getting farther along than anybody else to start at the same time as you I hope that's helpful we'll see you next week