Just when I think I get it right, I get it wrong and other cautionary tales. Patience. Three posts in one.

Someone’s listening

After several terms of students unable/unwilling to connect with anyone but each other, I announced I would no longer be teaching Kamikaze Creative Strategy™. 

The entire point of Prospect Centered Kamikaze Creative Strategy is turning your prospect beyond demographics into a trusted friend.  

Two and half terms, I was unable to move students out of networks, circles, friends, friends of friends, friends they have never have met but one of their friends' friends has, followers, followings and follower followers. 

Unable to move them into the real world of people unlike them in every way, it was either give up teaching the KCWP™ or give up teaching.

I gave myself one more term.  Started this group with a lengthy session on the Kamikaze Copy Sins™ instead.  

I felt a fraud.  As important as the Copy Sins are, not teaching the Prospect Centric KCWP™ meant I wasn’t teaching the most important thing I have ever/can ever share with students.

The shock - as soon as I stopped teaching it, half this term’s group asked me for a special session on Kamikaze Creative Strategy™ and The Kamikaze Creative Work Plan™.  

The plan is an extra Skype conference.  Interested students can participate, as per desire and drive.  Include their lessons in Skype one-on-ones as we move through writing body copy.

Looking at the individual students who asked for it, it makes perfect sense.  

Most are smarter than the average bear (you figure out the reference). Writing great copy isn’t enough for them.  They want to lead.  To strategize, conceptualize things no one has yet done.

I’m investing my time in them.

I'm hoping it results in paradigm changing careers.  Smarter, sharper, more creative, more prospect driven strategies - and work - than I’ve seen in a while.

 Constituents and other verbal horrors

Half my class – college grads – misused “constituent” in their first assignment.  They heard Jon Stewart and assumed it meant what it didn’t.

Have I told you about my old library dictionaries? 

We (hubby and I) have several, the oldest going back to the 20s – beautiful, leather bound, 2-3 feet deep, full color illustrated plates edged in real gold.  Each word has its root, its history, many applications, meaningful examples.

Juicy words may take up an entire column+.  With pictures.  Average words, at least three times what you'd expect.  

What's in the book from the 20s may not be in the one from the 40s.  What's in the 60s may not be in the 90s, etc.  Not only interesting, together they're a great lesson in living American English.

I start with the most current, go back dictionary by dictionary.  I know what the word means now.  I know what it meant fifty years ago.  When and how the meaning changed. 

Can split its semantic hairs, apply the right sentiment, understand who'll respond to it, who won't.  What style it suits.  When it'll stop a reader in his tracks.  For good.  For bad.  For why can’t I get that stupid word out of my head.

Why go there before I hit Thesaurus or Dictionary.com?  My beautiful, thoroughly outdated twenty pounders take us to the root of the word, its historical evolution from past to present use (if you start w/oldest and keep looking it up to the newest).  From meanings to shades, emotions of meanings.  Its de-evolution from present to past (if you reverse the order).  When it first appears.  When it died in the popular vernacular.

Extremely useful for writers who want their words read - and remembered - by people of any and every product/prospect pool.  

Doing so takes me beyond misunderstanding its current meaning.  Makes it almost impossible to do so (alas, Mercury does go Retrograde and all writers do not read with the same backgrounds and sensitivities). 

Once upon a time, I played anagrams (if you're a writer and have never played, shame!) with Richard Wilbur (past US Poet Laureate, two Pulitzers) and Leonard Baskin (sculptor, printmaker, Guggenheim Fellowship, Gold Medalist, American Academy of Arts & Letters - find a good museum, his work will be in there somewhere).  It's a simple game, forming words from words from words, doing anagrams few people see.  (Look it up.)

Up until then, I thought I had a better than decent vocabulary.  Only their kindness (and, I suspect, my awe at being in the same room with them) allowed me to "play" when I dared.  

My acknowledged ignorance kept me mostly watching over their shoulders, trying to figure out how they thought, where all those amazing words came from. 

That's when I bought my first "out of date" library dictionary.  Amazing what getting caught stupid by people you respect beyond admiration does for the soul.

You can now understand my dismay when 50% of the college graduate "writers" in my care misused a very popular (if heavily lettered) word. 

One misuse I might blow off (after a properly pithy remark).  But every student who used it got it wrong.  Now I’m left to figure out if I’m not as scary as I used to be or if real dictionaries, too, have gone the way of the dodo.

Here's Doreen's Rule:  Hearing it in context does not mean you know it.  Doesn't even mean you heard it in the right context.  Look it up.

Voting Rights (yours)

 (I promise I won’t mention it again)

One of my students told me he was going to vote in the upcoming Presidential Primary.  I have voted in every election – local, national, primary, presidential or not – since I turned twenty-one.  I grew up at a time when Civics was taught with the same weight as Math and English.  Voting is the price you pay for living in America.

Not the point. 

My point is since Citizens United, PACs and Super PACs have been playing with our Right to Vote through the state legislatures.

I don’t care if your vote cancels out mine.  I want you to vote.  

Before you assume you’ll be able to walk down the street from your classroom and cast your ballot, I urge you to look into the local voting laws where your car is registered, your Income Tax is filed and where you live while at school.  Some states have made it impossible for students (attending schools in different states/even different counties than their “parents'/home” address) to vote where they live while at school.

Do not assume since you voted a Presidential Primary or two ago from your school - or any - address you will be able to do so this time.

Primaries give you the chance to influence your future.  However you see it.  They’re at least as important as the General Election.  Don’t blow them off, even if you have to go "home" to exercise your Right to Vote. 

Along with state voter picture ID cards, “Party” registration and dozens of other smarmy sneaky ways to keep students and minorities from voting, you may have lost your right to vote without stopping in for dinner w/the folks. 

Check your general eligibility requirements before you assume.  States have been playing with those.  Congress is scraping the cojones off the Voting Rights Act.  Early and absentee voting, lawsuits for and against, more PAC money, more special interests all mean you need to check now. And every month or two up until Primary Day. Motor Voter may be dead in your state.  You may have renewed your driver's license, lost your voter registration.  Moved a block away, lost it that way.

You won’t get a reminder.  Special Interests don’t want you to vote unless you’re w/them 100%.  Not in Presidential (or any other) Primaries, Senatorial/ Congressional contests right down to who’s “representing” you in the state legislature.

Please, look into this.  Everyone who knows me knows my stance (if I leaned any further left, I’d fall off), but my views and whether or not you agree with them have nothing to do with this.

You must exercise your Right to Vote before you lose it. 

Check the state you came from.  Check the state you go to school in.  Make sure you do whatever you must to cast your vote soon, even if it cancels mine.

As women, we had to fight for that Right.  

As minorities, we're still fighting for it.  

As young adults, we had to fight to lower the voting age to 18 (the same age we could die in old men’s wars).

Be casual about it, you may find yourself disenfranchised before you know it (look it up).

Exercise your Right.  Those people trying to steal it from you are Wrong.

Now a sacred promise.  Not more politics.  The occasional civics lesson as it may apply to the business of advertising, but no politics before, between or to come.

Henceforth, this blog will return to the subject at hand:  Creative Strategy, Copywriting, Prospect Centered Concepts, freelancing, innovation, professional concerns and ad stuff even I haven’t thought up yet.