Oh, I used to hate Sundays. Far from the day of rest, it was the day of frantically preparing for a hellish week in the classroom, a sense of doom growing as the hours went by. In fact, this is how bad it was – you know how people get the ‘Sunday Scaries’ about going back to work Monday? Well, I used to get the Saturday Scaries, because of the mountain of work I had on Sundays. It’s one of many things from my teaching days I’m glad to see the back of.
Nevertheless, I’m grateful for some things. Teaching helped me buy a house. It opened my eyes to parts of society I’d never have understood otherwise. I met some amazing people.
And of course, the ordeals of teaching forced me to build resilience and survival skills. I’ve carried these over into my career as a freelance copywriter, so I suppose I should be grateful for those too. These are the five main ways my time in the classroom now helps me provide a better service to my copywriting clients.
Reliability – deadlines for breakfast
Planning and prepping resources for 5-6 lessons a day, 190 school days a year… that’s about 1000 deadlines a year. And that’s before you throw in all the data-inputting and report writing.
Compared to that, getting a first draft in before the weekend is a breeze, even when juggling several projects at once. Given the number of people I’ve heard complaining about unreliable freelancers, I feel fortunate that teaching equipped me to handle deadlines so effectively at the start of my copywriting career.
Strategic – crafting journeys
Assessment for learning is one of the pillars of education. It basically means understanding a kid’s level of knowledge. Where are they now? Where do they need to get to? What are the steps on the way? What are the barriers they’ll need to overcome? This is basically how you approach everything, from an entire year to a single lesson.
In recent months, I’ve started providing more strategic support to my clients instead of simply churning out words. And I’ve realised the process of assessment for learning is very similar to how you approach copywriting and marketing.
Whether it’s an entire buying journey, a series of emails or even a single webpage, you need to consider what level of awareness your audience is at. Do they even realise they have the problem you solve? Do they understand the problem, and are now looking for the right solution? Or do they already know about the solutions, and just need a nudge to choose yours?
When you understand what your audiences currently know, feel and believe, then you can plan how to move them towards the action you want them to take. You can tailor your messages to overcome the barriers.
That ability to understand someone’s current position and plan their progress, which I learned how to do as a teacher, is now serving me as a copywriter.
Collaborative – criticism forcefield
Clipboard-wielding headteachers would breathe down my neck while I taught. Deputy Heads crawled through our test scores, hunting for anomalies (and, in my opinion, making a big show of it to justify why they get paid £50k to mess about with spreadsheets all day, but that’s another matter). I’ve had subject leaders interrogating me as to why I didn’t follow their 50-page curriculum document to the letter (because it was so painfully dull it could have classed as child abuse).
The constant barrage of pressure, scrutiny and criticism has equipped me with armour. This doesn’t mean I ignore criticism and feedback from clients – it just doesn’t wound me. I can depersonalise it, look at it constructively and respond in a way that moves things forward. I’m proud that many of the client testimonials I receive mention this.
Inquisitive – rabbit holes and pointless facts
Everyone knows school is for stuffing kids’ heads with trivia they’ll never use in real life. As a teacher, you naturally absorb a mass of knowledge that’s utterly useless in 99% of situations.
The desire not to look stupid in front of your class also means you develop a habit of finding things out, digging deeper, wanting to be the expert in the room.
As well as making me a useful addition to your pub quiz team, this inquisitiveness and ability to research has helped with my copywriting. In fact, an acting coach I used to do email marketing for once said I ‘knew more about the industry than he did’.
When so much digital marketing contains the same vague and generic messaging, you need fresh ideas and deep knowledge to cut through the noise. Often it’s those nuggets – worthless anywhere else – that give you the basis for a winning idea.
Adaptability – a writing chameleon
As a teacher, I wrote for dozens of different audiences, adapting my messaging to suit them: stories for kids to analyse and rewrite; simplified instructions for kids with ADHD; feedback in children’s books; reports for parents; individual learning plans for SEN pupils; bids for additional science funding; emails to headteachers asking why they’ve scheduled yet another meeting outside working hours; letters to my union asking for advice on annual meeting limits…
What better preparation for copywriting? Whether you’re selling software or staycations or anything in between, I’ll write in a voice that hits the spot with your audience.
This adaptability has been especially valuable when working with agencies. I often work with several of their clients simultaneously, and they’ve appreciated my ability to write across different brand voices for different purposes.
And finally, something I’ve had to ‘unlearn’ since teaching
You’re thinking I’ve missed something obvious – surely being a teacher helped you with grammar and proofreading and all that. And you’re right.
Being a primary school teacher means being a grammar ghoul, haunting the souls of any poor little bugger who dares to write ‘there’ instead of ‘their’. Naturally, I carried this into copywriting. When I first started, I wrote in a more formal and florid way. I was big on grammar and correctness as a USP, always banging on about how there’d be no typos and everything would be impeccably written.
But that’s not the case any more. I’ve actually become less fussy about grammar. By school standards, I’ve become a worse writer. Though of course, I always proofread my work so it’s free of errors (now I’m shitting my pants in case there’s a typo in here somewhere and I’ve made a tit of myself).
This apparent degradation in standards can be hard to explain to people who don’t understand copywriting. You see, in schools, your writing is judged by the extravagance of its grammar – how many fancy words and punctuation marks can you show off? So that’s what a lot of people think good writing is.
But in the real world, writing is judged by its impact on people. Is it relevant? Is it engaging? Does it have emotional power? Is it clear and easy to read? Does it flow like conversation? Does it persuade people to do things? It can be all of these things without perfect grammar. In fact, perfect grammar can get in the way.
So there you have it. Despite the trials and traumas of my teaching career, it did set me on the path to becoming a reliable, strategic, collaborative, inquisitive, and adaptable copywriter.
And while I’m by no means the finished article, it usually means I do a pretty good job for businesses who want to get their message across more effectively. Drop me a line if that’s something you’re interested in, and let’s have a quick chat to see where we can improve your marketing. I won’t set you any homework, I promise.