Journal of Arts Marketing Issue 07 – October 2002
We write copy to give people information about the events and activities that our organisations offer, and to persuade them to take action. Unfortunately we don’t always succeed:
What I dislike about some brochures is that it’s very difficult to get the information out of them.
Midlands Arts Marketing, Live and Direct: research into contemporary music attendance in Nottingham (1998)
We’re all well-educated, articulate people, so why don’t we get our message across? Well, the problem is that we are well-educated, articulate people and most people are not. Most of the copy that we write is incomprehensible to most people because they can’t read it. Readability is about whether a piece of text can be read successfully. There are two sides to this, namely: do they have the necessary technical skills to read it; and can they get meaning from it? Quite often people are able to read bits of what we write but cannot integrate those bits into a meaningful whole…
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