To my utter mortification, I was the only girl in my 6th grade class who didn’t get into chorus. Not only was I unable to carry a tune, I discovered much later in life that my voice was so bad, my babies actually started crying when I tried singing them to sleep!

So while all of my female classmates went to chorus, I stayed back with the boys – and started the school newspaper. I couldn’t sing but I had found my voice.

To Play By The Rules…Or Maybe NOT

Always a lover of words, I readily admit that nothing crampled my style, dampened my creative spirit or tamped down my enthusiasm for writing more than having to follow some of the “rules” of grammar.

I know the rules, I mostly follow them and to this day I cringe when I hear people mangle the English language.

But even as a young kid – a budding writer way back then - I was adamant that the words I wrote had to “sound right” to me. Yet all too often, the rules of grammar got in my way.

Some Rules That Drive Me Crazy

• You can’t start a sentence with: “And, but, so, or, because.” And as you may already have noticed, this is still very difficult for me.
• You can’t end a sentence with a preposition. What’s that about? Instead of “Who are you waiting for,” should we really say, “For whom are you waiting?”
• Not only that. Every sentence has to have a noun and a verb.

And Then Along Came Winston

In the 1950′s and 60′s, when cigarette commercials delivered some of the best entertainment aired on radio and tv, Winston created quite a tizzy with their popular jingle, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.”

The tizzy was about grammar – because grammatically speaking, the jingle should be “Winston tastes good as a cigarette should.”

But despite criticism from educators, English teachers – even some advertising folks -Winston refused to back down. Because “like” sounded better than “as.”

Thus Began My Love Affair With Advertising

Fortunately, things have loosened up a lot since then. Language isn’t nearly as stagnant. The rules of grammatical correctness are more relaxed. And today’s speech is more fluid, more alive and much more authentic as new words and expressions keep popping up.

I Love When We Use Words In A New Way Or Turn Nouns Into Verbs

The other day I saw a woman walk right in front of a smiling group of people who were posing for a photo. When she realized her intrusion, she was quick to apologize, saying she didn’t realize they were “picturing.” Here are few more common examples:

• People used to disappear. Now we can disappear them.
• We hired babysitters long before we “babysat” anybody.
• Google started out as a noun (a search engine). Today we can google anything.

Yet even with today’s more “casual-speak,” my grammar-check in Word “crazies” up on me relentlessly. Go figure.

TIP: Advertising copywriting is not a grammatical exercise – it is a language with rules and phrases all its own. But these rules that are breakable…if you have a good reason.

That’s because adverting copy has to command attention in a crowded marketplace. Communicate your message in a relatively small space. Make an emotional connection with your target audience. And above all, sell, sell, sell.

So don’t write a textbook when you mean to write copy. And when you get tongue-tied, hire a talented professional to “copywriter” for you!