Back to work

Having spent last week exploring Berlin and carving pumpkins to celebrate hallowe'en, I’ve arrived back in the office feeling energised and ready to work, which is just as well really because there is so much to do!

The East Side Gallery, Berlin

A day off and a pumpkin later...

Now I’m back I’ll be turning my attention to the 2016 undergraduate prospectus. Kylie has been working hard on the flat plan - the working document that we’ll be able to refer to throughout the production process. Once that’s complete I, along with the rest of the team, will get involved in copywriting for the general sections of the prospectus. Writing is always a highlight as it's a chance to get creative.   

This week I’ll also be spending some time writing a selection of short news articles for our subject newsletters. With the help of academics who have shared some interesting stories with me, I’ve been able to pull together some of the highlights of the past year. Now it’s a case of writing them up into striking news items to help with our conversion efforts.

Over the next week or so I will be having meetings with potential new student bloggers. Our student bloggers come recommended by their lecturers, and will be blogging on a weekly basis about their time at the University of Bedfordshire. It's a great (and paid!) experience for them, and it means we gain lots of valuable content that allows us to showcase the student experience here to our future students. Hopefully we'll have the blogs up and running in the next few weeks.

This week marks the end of my first year at the University. It's hard to believe really but, when I look back on all the things I've learned so far, all the deadlines I've reached, and all the work I've helped to produce, I feel quite proud of what I've achieved. And, now that I've done it all once, finger crossed the second time round will be even better!

Clare

Hot off the press

Very excitingly, a box full of 2015 undergraduate prospectuses arrived in the office yesterday morning. We’re really pleased with the outcome of weeks and weeks of hard work; the die-cut cover has worked well, and the whole thing looks really fresh and colourful.

In other news this week...

I spent a day in London where I attended the CIM Principles of Great Copywriting course.

It was a pretty intensive day of training, but it was full of interesting discussion and creative ideas about how to keep copy accessible while making it fresh and exciting to read.

The course leader told us that if we want to write engaging copy, we must allow ourselves the space to be creative. Something that resonated with all the delegates was Disney’s model for coming up with ideas:

Three people walk into a room. Person one is the dreamer. The dreamer writes down all their thoughts without censoring of filtering them in any way. Person two is the realist; they enter the room and works through all the dreamer’s thoughts, trying to make sense of them and give them some logic, shaping them into a useable idea. Person three is the critic. The critic takes the ideas presented to them and brings up reasonable objections.

We, as writers, should be all three: we should start off by writing down a high volume of our most creative ideas. We probably won’t use them all, but might find one or two ideas that stand out and that we can work on and polish. Writers will always need to think about the practicalities of what they are writing and be ready to accept constructive criticism in order to create the strongest possible end product. 

The course couldn’t have been better timed, just before we start work on the 2015 postgraduate prospectus. Hopefully all the new ideas from training will inspire me to write some great copy.

Happy Friday!

Clare