Your reader

"We're all just monkeys with money and guns"

Tom Waits

To understand what makes good copy, we need to put the words to one side.

First, we need to examine who reads your words and under what conditions. That way, we can reverse engineer what kind of copy kills, and what kills copy.

The truth is, your reader is one of those messy, distracted, illogical things commonly referred to as a human.

Basically a monkey, with a veneer of respectability, often wearing clothes, and with just enough intelligence and ego to unfortunately forget they’re a monkey.

"Man is the most intelligent of the animals, and the most vain."

Edgar Allan Poe

So much of our lives are dictated by the monkey brain.

The monkey brain is the older part of the brain, the part we share with other mammals and primates. The primitive parts. Those parts that govern primal instincts and primal reactions, including fear, anger, pleasure, and survival.

In contrast, the parts that deal in higher order thinking, critical thinking, and social conduct, evolved much later. It’s the prefrontal cortex, part of the neocortex that governs these rational behaviours.

If you condensed evolution into a single day, hominins, our early human ancestors, would only come into the story at 11:58 PM.

The first early human ancestors with significant neocortex development, genus Homo, would only come onto the scene at 11:59:20 PM.

Those final 40 seconds represent two to three million years.

The preceding 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 20 seconds represent billions of years of evolution where primal instincts governed us.

We haven’t lost those parts of the brain.

Your readers have those parts of the brain.

Dr. Andrew Huberman talks about the prefrontal cortex as a filter for the monkey brain, not a replacement.

A checking system, but one we consciously need to engage, while the older instinctive parts do the subconscious, emotionally driven, decision making.

Basically, humans today are still learning to filter the monkey brain. For writers like you and me, we’re up against billions of years of evolution. And in our comparatively insignificantly minuscule life spans, nothing will change.

So, we will only ever have two options:

1. Change our words to fit human nature
2. Change human nature to fit our words
   
   

There’s no way I want to fight four billion years of evolution. But it seems lots of businesses and people are up for the challenge.

As if writing for the monkey brain wasn’t difficult enough, you now have to consider the environment in which you want that monkey to stop, and pay you attention.

Reading conditions are war-like, because readers are assaulted on five fronts:

• 349 emails
• 33 tabs
• 19 newsletters
• Netflix
• Spotify

• Dinner with friends
• Long commutes
• Loud offices

• Sugar crashes
• Poor sleep
• Brain fog
• Low energy

• Rent
• Energy bills
• Inflation
• Redundancy

• Failing relationships
• Low self esteem
• Anxiety
  
  

Your copy is up against all of this. Not just other writing, but your reader’s entire existence.

You’re in a perpetual battle. Copywriters are really, copyfighters. And you can’t control any of it. Your copy interrupts their life when you press publish, because there’s no ready to read button for them to press.

In this harsh environment only efficient messages survive.

Messages your reader will find engaging and easy to process.

That’s where Atomic Copy comes in.