State And Future Of Copywriting As A Discipline Of Liberal Art's English

Current State and Future of Copywriting as a Discipline of Liberal Art’s English

Copywriting is an under-researched topic in the field of composition, though some seem to argue it doesn’t fall into the field of composition at all. Because the teaching of copywriting has limited regulation, the definitions vary as well. Henson (1996) places copywriting within the world of creating advertisements, or other promotional material which reaches an audience with a set goal in mind. Because copywriting is a genre of writing and relies on rhetoric, it belongs within the discipline of rhetoric and composition. Despite being within the realm of rhetoric and composition, the two disciplines don’t cooperate because of the more scientific connotations of

Technical writing has been considered, the writers themselves have given voice to their processes, research on writing processes was done, and even more interestingly: we look at the way businesses engage with writing in a modern market. The approach to research comprised looking at copywriting from those different outside lenses, or subjects adjacent to it in order to piece together a more complete and complex picture. While it isn’t perfectly within the copywriting discipline, having a larger demographic to pull from helps put copywriting into its fuller perspective. I think this is especially evident in the present where the nonacademic perspective reigns supreme and little research is put into the study of copywriting itself. Living in a consumeristic/consumer-driven world, thankfully more research is done on what actually makes businesses money: how the copy interacts with the viewer, or how it interacts with the

Henson (1996) describes the common initiation into the copywriting sphere: she was introduced to it in her jobs and outside of taking a few non-college level classes, she was mostly self-taught. Continuing with Harris’ (1982) discussion, she suggests an anti-academic or purely engineering perspective of technical writing is one reason why the pedagogy of copywriting hasn't been studied or taught extensively at the college level. She continues by