Copywriting Short Course For Fourth Graders

Do you remember fourth grade? Age 9 or 10. It’s a great age!

I recently had the opportunity to present on my career as a copywriter to a group of fourth graders. Considering this group is nearing the perfect age for which a good copywriter typically writes (readability tests show most people absorb writing at the 6th grade level), I thought at first, “This will be easy.”

Furthermore, kids are friendly, smart, and don’t have any firmly planted notions yet.

But when a facebook friend warned, “Tough crowd,” I started to panic a little. How hard could this really be?

First, I kept thinking that the Flesch Reading Ease score rests comfortably at around the 6th or 7th grade. That’s the level of reading that is the easiest to read while being the most persuasive. You can read all about it here.

These kids are in the gifted and talented program at the school, so I figured they’re pretty much perfect to test copywriting on. Only they weren’t there to read copy, they were there to hear me speak about copywriting. Slightly different thing.

There were a few ways I could have tilted the discussion, but I finally decided to focus on “The Power of Words.”

Here’s how the slide show turned out…