I know of a company that somtimes hired a professional copywriter to come up with ad headlines and slogans. He charged top dollar for what he did, which was fair enough: he was in high demand and provided a very good product.

Most of the time.

Sometimes (not that often, though) he’d be a little bit off the mark. He’d do the work, put the time into reflecting on the brief, come up with a lot of ideas, refine those ideas and present this company with several options. But for whatever reason—a misinterpretation of the brief, an inference taken from a throwaway comment, whatever—he didn’t quite hit the mark with the tone. And the work wasn’t terrible; it wasn’t thrown back in his face; he wasn’t run out of town. He just didn’t quite hit the mark.

It happens.

Now, the company didn’t want to spend any more on the expensive copywriter so that he might go back (for another hour or two) and get it right. Instead, they gave the job to the employee that books the ads, who reworked it and got the tone right. But in doing so, made the copy grammatically incorrect, making a subject/object agreement error that wasn’t immediately apparent to the client who was just checking for tone by this stage.

The ad went to print and, of course, the error was picked up later. (Which is too late.)

The moral of the story is that good copywriters put more into their work than just cool ideas. They care about syntax, they worry about semantics and they pore over every conjunction or preposition.

Getting the tone spot-on 100% of the time is a bonus.

(As an aside, someone once asked me what difference a preposition could make to the meaning of a sentence. I offered “I just threw out last night’s dinner” vs “I just threw up last night’s dinner”.)