Slogan writing

Most of the time The Writing Rag is about expository writing—writing to communicate information in a manner that causes the least amount of effort for your readers. One of my rules of thumb is that if your reader has trouble understanding, the problem is with the writing, not the reader. Business letters, instructions, technical writing, essays, and (in my opinion) good journalism fall into this type of writing.

Other useful kinds of writing exist, whose intent might be to amuse, inspire, motivate (cause action), persuade (cause belief), or cause any number of other effects in a reader. To accomplish these, someone might use poetry, short stories, novels, riddles, essays. You name the genre, the writer has a reason for exposing a reader to it. Obviously some writing formats fit into more than one purpose—blog posts, for example.

For completeness, I should remind you that sometimes the writer is the reader, and the purpose might be to clarify thinking, record events, or express feelings. For these purposes we have notes, journals, diaries.

One kind of writing has the goal of creating a mindset in the reader. This type of writing is the slogan. I am tempted to give a bunch of examples, but I’d rather let you suggest a few of your favorites in the comments.

A famous slogan: Do a good turn daily.

That one was suggested by Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting. I’m not going to tell you how to write an original slogan, but if you have a nicely codified way to write one, please share with all of us in the comments.

Instead, I must cop out. I found a website that creates a slogan for you. Type in something, click the button, and you get a slogan.  Here’s the link. Go play with it. http://thesurrealist.co.uk/slogan.cgi. They even give you a snippet of code so you can put a slogan you like on your website, with a link to their site, of course. Here’s my favorite, so far:

After trying a few, I figured out that they plug your word into a selection of existing slogans, some well-known, and sometimes with amusing results. How about

You’re in the Grammar Generation!

My apologies to that carbonated sugar water.

I suppose that’s one way to create a slogan: Take a popular meme and plug your own words into it. Some of my colleagues told me about the most interesting man in the world recently, mainly because I had never heard of him and I look like his brother. So I’ll offer his meme for a slogan base:

I don’t often write letters to the president, but when I do, I use good grammar.

My third invitation to comment: What can you come up with? Share.