In the 1980s, copywriting was a lot different than it is today. Electronic copywriters didn’t exist (or if they did, they were pretty much unheard of) and businesses largely wrote their own marketing materials, using typewriters and word processors. Here’s a taste of what it was like.
No Punctuation
Whether you were a marketing professional or an individual writing for personal use, you probably still follow basic punctuation rules. You wouldn’t write, “It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, and I wanted to go for a walk. So, I left the house at 10:00 a.m.” Now, you’d write, “It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, and I wanted to go for a walk. So, I left the house at 10:00 a.m., and soon thereafter, I encountered a terrible case of road rage. Without going into great detail, I’ll just say that I had a run-in with some maniacs who wanted to beat me up because they thought I was stopping them from getting to where they wanted to go. At first, I tried to reason with them, and even showed them how dangerous their driving was, but they didn’t want to listen. So, when I saw a cop coming towards me, I quickly pulled over and waited for the officer to arrive. In the meantime, I was being hit on the head with a baseball bat and pistol-whipped. When the cop arrived, I explained to him what had happened and luckily, he apprehended the two assailants.” The writer of this fictional story would use commas to separate the events, and the semicolons to indicate the story’s shifts in time. In copywriting today, we would use the bulleted list as a way of structuring our stories and breaking them up with paragraphs of various sizes, featuring active and passive voice, and maybe even a few stories in between!
Handwritten Manuscripts
If you got your hands on a typewriter back in the day, you might very well have spent a lot of time writing by hand. Businesses, magazines, and newspapers relied heavily on typewriters as a way to get their writing done. If you had a bit of a fever, or simply got frustrated with the repetitive nature of pounding on a typewriter, you could very well have taken up calligraphy. In the summer of 1982, I had the good fortune of taking a correspondence course in creative writing through my church. One of the assignments was to write a short story, and on the last day of class, we were all asked to bring our completed manuscripts to class to have our work critiqued by our teachers. I was so nervous about my story being graded that I went into a total panic and rushed to the car to bring my completed work to my mother. When I got into the car, I realized I’d forgotten something and turned around to grab my gym bag. As I was doing this, the top of my head collided with the roof of the car, causing a gash to open up and bleed profusely. The wound didn’t hurt that much, but the sound of the crunching cartilage was quite disturbing. I decided not to go to school that day, and when my parents asked why, I told them I had a migraine. In the time that followed, my father bought me a German Shepherd puppy, which I named Terence. He was a great watch dog and even better at guarding my manuscripts against any potential plagiarists. Sadly, he died of kidney failure at the age of 17 in December of 1987. To this day, I still haven’t found a use for that typewriter.
Screenplays And Short Stories
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, screenplays and short stories were the go-to genre for businesses that needed copy. You know those cheesy inspirational movies where the guy would say something like, “If you can dream it, you can do it,” or “You can’t tell where writing ends and music begins”? Those were always written as screenplays or short stories, and they were pretty much required viewing (and listening) for anyone who wanted to be a writer.
The best part about the ’70s and ’80s was that they were the golden age of reading. Just about anyone could enjoy a good book (for the most part), and if you wanted to read something that was a little more challenging, you could always find a collection of short stories or a biography. Even if you weren’t particularly drawn to written word, the sheer volume of material made it accessible to anyone.
Diary Manuscripts
In high school (or middle school, for those of you who were there earlier), you would have had to keep a daily journal, in which you chronicled the events of each day. I kept a journal in high school, and it was one of the most important things in my life. I don’t know if it was the act of writing that helped me organize my thoughts and put them in order, but I found that after I got the habit of keeping a daily journal, it was much easier for me to stay organized as I got older, and even now, as an adult, I still keep a journal. My parents would often get nervous about me keeping a daily journal, as it could become quite a task to keep track of everything. They would ask me questions about my day, and I would feel annoyed that they were interrogating me. But I would always reply that I felt that a day without writing in my journal was a wasted day. I think my parents finally realized that writing in my journal was helpful for my mental health, and that it would be better for me to have something to look back on than to let the days go by without any recollection at all.
Odds And Ends
It wouldn’t be fair to call the ’70s and ’80s the “age of copywriting.” There were so many changes in the field over those two decades, and it would be an understatement to say that the profession evolved greatly. In the early days, businesses mostly wrote their own letters, brochures, and manuals. Now, with the help of technology, they can easily create digital versions of all of these documents and send them to customers and prospects via email.
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, businesses also used telex machines and modems to send and receive paper-based documents. If you were working in an office during those days, you would very likely have used a modem—a device that allowed for the transmission of computer files over telephone lines—to connect to the internet, which was mostly available only to colleges and universities at the time.
The internet also helped businesspeople find freelance writers and editors to assist with their copy. If you wanted to become a copywriter, you would have looked for opportunities online, rather than trying to get a job at a regular newspaper or magazine. You would have gone to websites like Upwork or Fiverr and looked for projects that needed some editorial help.
Over the past couple of decades, the field of copywriting has changed dramatically. Gone are the days of typewriters and manuscript carts, replaced with laptops, tablets, and cell phones. Technology has made it much easier for businesses to create and distribute their own marketing materials, and it’s also made the job much more accessible to anyone with a decent laptop or tablet. The field of copywriting has changed with the times, and it continues to evolve today as new technologies emerge and existing ones become more powerful.