Writing Boots

Something’s gone wrong with VYVGART Hytrulo.

This is one of those drugs, like Skyrzi, that treats diseases that have been invented since we were kids, like Wet AMD, moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis—and, in this case a thing called CIDP, which apparently makes walking difficult.

For a few years now, we’ve watched a commercial featuring a woman with a cane “hitting the road with my number one” (her fella, I guess) … and a cloyingly dweeby guy in leg braces, “hitting the fairways with the fellas.”

Well Wednesday night, I saw a new version of the ad. The woman is still rambling with her Romeo, but this time, the guy isn’t hitting the fairways with the fellas. He’s playing miniature golf with three other middle aged men, and boasts that he’s “putting with the fellas.” Clank!

Ummmm, first, four grown men playing mini golf together should face questions from journalists and the scrutiny of public mental health agencies if not the police. Second, if you’re reshoot your commercial to capture this odd scenario, can we adjust the copy to keep the alliteration? “Putting with my pals.” Was that so hard?

But most puzzling: What claim about the limitations of VYVGART Hytrulo caused lawyers and ad people to hunker down together and agree to convert a round of real golf into some kind of perverted adult putt-putt?

I can’t find a version of the new ad online, or any explanation of it. But something’s happening here. And at Writing Boots, we’re going to get to the bottom of it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: These drug commercials are almost as diverting as drugs, themselves.

Saw a pithy LinkedIn post yesterday:

The only problem is, I’m not sure today’s AI users know what the word “hack” means. I explained it, in a Writing Boots piece in 2021.

***

A graphic designer I worked with a very long time ago once received my copy and began laying it out into a newsletter. After an interval, she yelled over the cubicle wall: “Dave, the sidebar on page three is three inches short. You need to write some more shit.”

That’s what I think about—still—whenever I hear someone describe writing as “producing content.” I think of it as “writing some more shit.”

Or this new term that I’m seeing writers using to describe what they do: They say they do “content writing.”

That means doing video scripts, blog posts, email newsletters, speeches, social media posts, podcast series, white papers, website copy, landing pages—what have you.

It means you’ll write any old shit that needs to be writ, to fit.

There used to be another word for that sort of writer, but it became impolite to utter, because at some point it described too many writers too harshly. As I described it here once: “A corporate communication hack is someone who with a straight face calls the new corporate podcast ‘slightly irreverent,’ the new employee video ‘kind of fun’ and the CEO’s blog ‘a bit edgy.’”

Not everything we write is art; but writers worthy of the name should always have a communication purpose higher than filling empty spaces with blank words arranged to look look, sound and smell like ideas or feelings.

And at the very least, we ought to know the difference between writing and “content writing.” To paraphrase e.e. cummings (as I often do):

Olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some content I will not eat”

***

There always were and there always will be, a hell of a lot of people who have no faith that meticulously chosen words communicate better than hastily chosen ones. There are more yet who don’t care about communicating better in the first place. Most of these people are truck drivers or accountants. But some of them purport to make their living as professional communicators. Those people, whether they type their own clichés or prompt AI to burp them up, are hacks.

And you and I, my serious and honest writer friend, should steer well clear of these people, lest we get some of their cold-fart stench up our noses and in our clothes.