The Copywriter’s Dilemma
The traffic light out the living room window keeps me great company on lonely nights. I watch it click from red to green to yellow and back to red. It reminds me that the world is still going on out there, not matter what. The abstract metonymy is not lost on me. Watching the walk signal counting down. Over and over. Life is happening, even if mine is not.
Homonyms and heteronyms. My arch enemies when performing these under-appreciated feats of copy: alarmingly charming bits of sentences scrapped and recast and fitted back together to get the highest engagement from an audience of called-to-action dolts. I trudge forward, single-spaced and comma wary, weary with em dashes and ellipses, throat numb with the lees of lukewarm coffee. My copy of the Chicago Manual of Style is so haggard that it’d fit in nicely with a dumpster diver’s discarded trove. I do not spell as well as I once was able; I am not very prone to accidental charm anymore. The times I spend between jobs have turned into piles of wasted rubble. Why doesn’t a different meaning confer a spelling change? Is it “that” or “which”? Does that comma go outside of the quotation marks in a parenthetical? Where should that paragraph end? I ask myself these mundane questions daily. And where does it get me? Another pointless question falling in the silence of freelancing desolation.
