Most people who gravitate toward copywriting love words. Dishing up lots of them is relatively easy. The real challenge is editing to achieve a tight and lively style.

So if your writing has become bloated and sluggish, perhaps what you need is a little exercise to trim the fat and energize your selling copy.

The exercise I have in mind is based on radio advertising and will challenge you to write a complete, action-inducing sales pitch that can be spoken aloud in exactly 60 seconds. I got the idea for this recently while writing radio ads for several products. It occurred to me that while this form of writing uses few words, it takes incredible discipline to make those words sell.

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We live in the information age. And boy do we get blasted with information. It’s dumped on us by the truckload.

Three pounds of stuff in the mailbox a day. 507 TV channels to flip through to find the weather report. 623 e-mail messages selling male enhancement pills.

And that’s only a fraction of the information that bombards us. There are billboards along the highway, news broadcasts on the radio, memos and telephone calls at the office, instruction manuals for office equipment that won’t work, family schedules to remember, bills, books, seminars, random conversations at lunch time, business meetings, it never ends.

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Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a fondue pot. Stir in 3 tablespoons of flour and cook on low for 2 minutes. Mix in 1 1/2 cups of dry white wine and stir until thick. Slowly stir in 1 1/2 cups grated Swiss Cheese. Beat 4 egg yolks and 2 tablespoons of thick cream and add to mixture. Season with 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg and white pepper. Add a dash of Kirschwasser. Serve with cubes of your favorite breads and diced vegetables.

If copywriting were only as simple as this tasty cheese fondue, writing sales copy would be easy.

Alas, it’s not.

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When I was asked to teach a copywriting class for a special program at Ohio State University, I discovered that teaching writing is far more difficult than the writing itself. Many of the things I did naturally from experience or instinct were a complete mystery to my students.

So, in order to make the copywriting process a logical and painless operation, I devised a simple method for writing ad copy for novice writers. I called it POWER Copywriting, an acronym for the five steps in the copywriting process: Prepare, Organize, Write, Edit, and Review.

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