Copywriting as an independent branch of science



The scientific article is devoted to copywriting and the foundations of the theory of copywriting as a science in general. The basis of the question is whether copywriting can become a separate science This type of activity is the writing of quality advertising and information texts for magazines and other information publications. Under copywriting today is more often understood — the writing of unique articles, as well as the source is not other articles, but personal experience or already known knowledge. The article deals with the scientific grounds for copywriting and the abstraction of copywriting theory. In English, the word «copywriting» is a neologism and is not represented in dictionaries. The word «copywriter» is treated as a «writer of advertising and propaganda texts» (a writer of advertising or publicity copy). There is a system of the theory of copywriting in article, which specifies such criteria as methodology, scope and general concepts.

Keywords: copywriting, branch of science, scientific basis, hermeneutics, system of knowledge, objective principles, the system of copywriting theory.

Ключевые слова: копирайтинг, научная дисциплина, научные основания, герменевтика, система знаний, объективные принципы, система теории копирайтинга.

XXI century is the era of Internet communications and digital revolution, where computerized industry is developed which is based on the transfer of information. The information era is characterized by a global shift from the traditional industry and continues up to now. There are powerful capabilities to receive and transmit information instantly. The information era made possible rapid global communications and the existence of information networks, which significantly changed the form of modern society. There are new professions are relevant, which could not exist outside the Global Network in such conditions. One of such professions is a copywriter. One of such professions is a copywriter. Copywriting the act of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing in the Internet space. Such texts have a set of pre-defined characteristics that allow to achieve the main goal to increase the conversion of the site, that is, the ratio of the number of people who accomplish a purpose after visiting the site and acquaintance with its content, and the total number of visitors to the resource. There are two issues for the creation copywriting — effective impact on the reader and the provision of productive indexing by search systems. In addition, the characteristics of the texts can be as originally conditioned by SEO-requirements, and adapted to the conditions of a particular site, set out by the web master in the technical assignment.

According to professional resources for freelancers, copywriters are in the top three in the rank of the demand for professions in the field of Internet business together with programmers and web designers. But if the basic knowledge for mastering the last two professions can be obtained in high schools and colleges, then the specialty of «copywriting» does not exist. Accordingly, the scientific basis for this type of activity has not been formed. Today all the knowledge of copywriting is exclusively empirical. There are only practical methods of writing SEO-texts, supplemented by marketing techniques used long before the appearance of the Internet profession in thematic literature. However, attempts to bring disparate knowledge of copywriting to a unified theory has not been realized.

To conclude whether copywriting can become a full-fledged discipline, whether it is possible to recognize it as scientific knowledge, it should be analyzed whether the range of available empirical knowledge in this area corresponds to scientific criteria. [1,p.20] We use the criteria proposed by professor V. P. Kokhanovsky. He argues that scientific knowledge must conform the following scientific criteria:

– conclusiveness and validity of knowledge, the existence of scientific background;

– the occurrence of concern to find objective laws of reality and the expression of key characteristics in the form of abstractions;

– consistency of knowledge;

– methodologic reflection;

– application in the process of cognition of material means and ideal methods;

– the consolidation of concepts, theories, hypotheses, laws in the language, the avail-ability of specific terms;

– the possibility to foresee the future on the basis of the key laws of the functioning of the knowledge in question for the practical assimilation of reality. [1,p.21–29]

Search of the scientific bases of copywriting.

Copywriting is original statement of the author's thoughts on the offered subject. However, in fact, absolutely new texts are extremely rare in this area. We are dealing with qualitative rewriting. It is a deep retelling of the source material obtained by compiling several texts on the relevant topic and presenting it in a new structural form. Texts from other web-sites act as primary sources. It is reasonable to assume that they are also a product of several rewriting cycles, the amount of which can not be reliably established. Let's say that we could establish the Internet source which the first rewriter used (although in practice it is not customary to give away such information). But there is probability that its author did not rely on an authoritative scientific source. It is a book, an article or a statistical report. Modern books or articles also have references to literature created in earlier periods.

Thus, we can accept that rewriting (and, in fact, copywriting) is a process of endless interpretation of texts with the addition of new meanings, clarifications and explanations. This position brings our search for the scientific foundations of copywriting to hermeneutics. As

F. Schleiermacher said «The process of interpretation is endless, we can only come to a final interpretation». [4, p. 231]

In addition, according to the German philosopher, the misunderstanding of difficult places is a consequence of a lack of understanding of lighter places, and first of all hermeneutic methods should serve to prevent difficulties, and not to completely eradicate them. [4,p.240] One of the particular tasks of copywriting in relation to the reader is the most accessible presentation of sometimes quite difficult to understand thoughts. For this, various methods are used, not limited to the selection of simple for perception formulations. This is the presentation of as short phrases, and text structuring (splitting it into small paragraphs, using lists instead of narration), and highlighting keywords.

At first it can be regarded as connivance to the cultural degradation of mankind, be-cause the recipient of the copywriting product is represented as an individual who is not able to perceive a sentence longer than two lines and possesses the skills of nonlinear reading. But on the other hand, as P. Riker said, the deep intention of interpretation consists precisely in overcoming the cultural distance, which consists in distancing a person from an incomprehensible text. [3, p. 25] The meaning of such a text by the efforts of the interpreter should be included in the scope of the reader's understanding The source of motivation for a site visitor to perform a certain targeted action is precisely understanding, and the task of the copywriter is to get the reader to overcome the misunderstanding. And given that not all sites are of an advertising and commercial nature, we can conclude that copywriting through the elimination of misunderstanding contributes to the acquisition of not only ordinary. Now let's try to correlate the essence of copywriting with the main canons of interpretation by A.Betty:

– semantic autonomy of the object;

– totality;

– the urgency of understanding;

– correlativity of meaning.

1. Autonomy of the object. Independence of the meaning of the transmitted material from the copywriter is fully observed. Even realizing the requirement of uniqueness, the author should not violate the independence of the transmitted meaning from his own subjectivity.
2. Totality The coherence between the semantic blocks of the text is also observed. It is worth emphasizing that the allocation of blocks in the text for Internet resources is necessary, since it promotes a deeper understanding of the material as a whole. In this case, a logical connection must be established between the blocks.
3. the urgency of understanding; In order to fit the transmitted meaning into the context of vital relevance, the copywriter has the right to make references to life experience without being subjective at the same time.
4. Correlativity of meaning It is interpreted as an interpreter's duty to abstract from one's own prejudices, is especially important in copywriting. Any distortions or nonexistent details expressing personal expectations or the opinion of the author (especially when it comes to advertising texts that describe the properties of the goods or the conditions offered by the company) are prohibited. Texts for sites should be exclusively informational, value-neutral and devoid of a subjective component. [2, p. 48]

Thus, we can conclude that copywriting is the part of the general architecture of hermeneutics, which can serve as its scientific basis. One can not ignore the impact of marketing on copywriting. In particular, this concerns the technique of writing sales texts and commercial proposals. However, this influence is more rational to consider in the practice and we are more interested in theoretical premises.

Objective laws and abstractions of the theory of copywriting.

First, we will try to formulate the main law on the basis of an empirical body of knowledge obtained in the process of copywriting activity.

The text responding to a number of criteria has a psychological effect on the individual, forcing him to perform the targeted action (make a purchase, subscribe for updates and regularly return to the site, join the community, click on the link). [2, p. 115]

These criteria include:

– relevance is the content matching to the user's search query;

– readability (here you can include not only the author's beautiful syllable, structuring and presentation in short sentences, but also literacy and the absence of oversampling or low «nausea» of the text);

– specifics (in the sphere of copywriting this is called a low indicator of «wateriness» of the text);

– uniqueness (this criterion plays a role not only in search indexing, but also in the perception of texts by visitors: people are not interested in materials completely copied from other sites);

– practical utility;

Is it possible to express any characteristics of a text in an abstraction system?

First, the percentage of the text expresses the uniqueness of the text. It is determined by means of various software products that estimate the share of borrowings in a common text array. Acceptable indicators — 96–100 % (if the text contains many names of documents, geo-graphical objects or other names, the replacement of which is impossible, a slight decrease in the threshold of uniqueness is allowed).

Secondly, there is a formula by which you can calculate the allowable number of key-words in the text.

NK = (NW— NSW)* N

NK — number of keys;

NW — number of words;

NSW — number of stop words (unions, prepositions, interjections that do not carry semantic load);

N — «nausea» of text;

In turn, the «nausea» of the text can be classical (calculated with respect to the fre-quency of use of a single keyword) and academic (calculated comprehensively for all key-words in general).

The admissible values for classical «nausea» of the text are 2.64–7 %, for academic — 3–5 %.

Third, in the percentage ratio, the «wateriness» of the text is calculated — the proportion of words that do not carry semantic load. If we take into account that there are no texts with-out prepositions, unions, interjections and particles of texts, it becomes obvious that some de-gree of «wateriness» will be present in any case. It is called natural and it is limited to a max-imum level of 15 %. Common figures of speech,introductory words, phraseological units, etc. increase this indicator and, accordingly, reduce the quality of texts.

We can conclude that the quality of the text increases in direct proportion to its uniqueness and inversely proportional to fogginess («nausea») and «wateryness».

The system of copywriting theory

To systematize knowledge in copywriting in general terms can be as follows:

1. General concepts copywriting, rewriting, their differences, the essence of the professional activity of the copywriter, the competence and ability of the copywriter.
2. Areas of application of copywriting and rewriting, their tools and methods.
3. The methodology of copywriting General architectonics of SEO text, rules for writing SEO text, its structure and main components:

– key words direct occurrence, morphological occurrence, frequency;

– anchors: essence, differences from keywords, their use;

– html-tags: