Copywriting

The craft of writing text designed to persuade readers to act — in advertising, marketing, and any context where words must move people. The defining discipline is the headline: the single sentence that determines whether the rest gets read.

David Ogilvy’s canonical formulation: “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” The implication is that most copywriting effort should go into the headline, not the body.

The @colinyjchung thread on headline types (archived in Kyle’s wiki before it was deleted from X) catalogued sixteen functional categories, illustrating that the headline is a learnable system rather than a gift — different formats serve different persuasion goals (curiosity, authority, specificity, transformation, etc.). Ogilvy’s Breakthrough Advertising is the foundational text on the craft.

Copywriting is closely related to Rhetoric as a systematic approach to persuasion; it differs in its commercial context and its emphasis on brevity and immediacy.

Where this appears

• 16 Types of Headlines-Hooks ⤵️… (tweet)