Why a copywriter should write in an HTML editor

The article can be written in any text editor or on paper. A good article can only be written in a text editor in which the function of visual text formatting is disabled or does not exist.

I have to use the services of freelancers in my work - my company provides naming services, conducts and plans PR and marketing campaigns - this is not important. It is important that I read and edit a lot of texts every day. At the same time, I don’t even need to start reading the text in order to understand its quality - just look at it.
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If the text contains words in bold (with the exception of the title), italics, color or larger size, then such text can be sent for revision without even reading. There will surely be logical errors, emotional poverty and a poor syllable.

I had to write my first article in a newspaper on a Brother electronic typewriter. She had a black and white LCD screen, a typo correction function (within the line) and two “daisies”: with Russian and English layouts (to switch to another language, you had to change the “daisy”). After I had a computer and for more than a year I wrote articles in the text editor MS Word 5.5 for DOS.

After ten years of work as a journalist and editor, I derived a simple rule - the formatting of the text replaces its content. This is cheating. It is a way to express emotion without words. This is a great skill for a designer and a bad habit of a copywriter.

How to identify a good copywriter from the first time:

• It sends text in pdf or txt format. Each of these formats has its advantages, it is a matter of preference.
• There is a headline in his material. Paragraph formatting supports the logical structure of the text. Absence of paragraphs, non-uniform paragraphs - all these are signals of the destroyed logic of presentation. The solid text is not worth reading.
• There is no visual formatting in the material. It is desirable that it was absent completely, except for the design of the title.
• The material lacks or uses minimal emotional punctuation marks - exclamation marks and question marks, ellipses and semicolons.

Writing text that meets the above criteria in MS Word is complex. The notebook is too ascetic.

The ideal alternative is an HTML editor. There are many, there are paid and free versions. You can use snippets for repeating patterns; (address data, signature, administrative markup). For editing it is convenient to use line numbering, some editors allow counting the number of characters and words.

If you have to make a choice between several copywriters (we assume that the quality of the texts is approximately the same for them), ask, in the meantime, in which programs they work.