“Mummy can we bake a cake and make it look like a slipper to confuse Daddy? Like on ‘Is it Cake?”

These are the words that greeted me in the supermarket when my 6-year-old daughter came running up to me with handfuls of colourful cake icing. 

If you know me then you know I cannot cook, and I definitely cannot bake. So, what did I say as I looked into those beautiful eyes full of hope and expectation? 

 “Of course! Let’s do it.”

I knew in my heart that I was going to let her down. I wouldn’t be able to pull off what she had in her mind. But we could have a fun day mixing ingredients and making a mess together. 

It’s true that I don’t know what I’m doing, but I can follow a recipe to bake something that resembles cake. It won’t look much like a slipper, and it might not taste great.  But by golly we we're going to give it a go. 

Why am I telling you this?

Because writing copy is very much like baking a cake. There are ingredients that need to be mixed. The icing on the top of the copy cake is the persuasive impact that it has on the target audience. 

The part that makes the copy so amazing that it could be on ‘Is it Cake?’ the well known Netflix TV show, comes from the time attention and detail that has gone into the research prior to writing. 

The time spent adding the fine details on the cake is the time spent fine tuning, proofreading and editing. 

As my daughter and I created our disastrous slipper cake, she asked, “How do those people get so good at this?” She was referring to the contestants on the cake baking show, where our minds are regularly blown with their genius. 

My response? 

Practise! 

The age old saying that we are all sick of hearing, is true. Practise makes perfect! 

In every profession.

No-one ever woke up one morning with this amazing ability to make a cake look exactly like a slipper. Just as no-one wakes up and can just write the most mind-blowing copy. 

It takes time, effort and above all...practise.