Paul Lessing: What Advertising Has Done For Literature

April 19, 2010 in Advertising, copywriting, Des Moines, Iowa, Marketing, Paul Lessing
Tags: Advertising, copy writing, effect of advertising on literature, Lessing-Flynn, literature, Paul Lessing

Twenty years ago advertising was called a graft, ten years ago a game.  Today it is styled a profession and the best brains of the world are clamoring for admission.

The profession of advertising rewards its devotees highly because it demands much.  The capable advertising writers of today are keen, studious men, – men of college training – men who know books as well, and their fellow men better, than any author.

Throwing their trained minds and eager spirits into their writing, their copy is more interesting, more alive than the fiction of professional authors.  It was said at first as a joke but has come to be a truism that the advertisements in modern magazines are more interesting than the reading matter.

It is the ad writer, rather than the litterateur who is shaping our language today.  Do you doubt it?  Pick up any magazine or novel you please.  The endless sentences of Thackery, Dickens, Macauley, or our own “innocuous desuetude” Cleveland, are gone.  Instead are short sentences, with a snap-snapping like the staccato detonations of a Maxim.

No writer of fiction originated this style.  It was the ad writer.  He read the secret passages of the human mind. He saw that the mind can follow two thoughts of ten words each, more easily than one thought told in twenty words.  He voiced his successful bid for dollars in rapid fire sentences and the fiction writer followed.

“Ad”  “Adscript” and “Ad-writer” are accepted members of the Vocabulary club.  “Make good”  “Money back,”  “Do it now” were coined by copy connoisseurs.  And a host of others.  Take heart of grace, copy writers.  You’ve broken into polite society.

Author: Paul Lessing
Lessing Advertising Agency
Des Moines, Iowa
July, 1911

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