Valiantly. Mining. The. Full. Stop. Mountain.

I saw one of the adverts from IDA Ireland’s recently-launched ‘Irish Mind’ campaign in this week’s edition of The Economist. The first paragraph of body text begins: “The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible.”

Those sort. Of oddly punctuated. Staccato-rhythm. Emphatic sentences. Seem both. Mannered and dated. To. Me.

I honestly thought that old technique of advertising copywriter’s rhetoric had been parodied so much that it was more or less unusable. It seems. I was. Mistaken. Writing in such Shatner-speak may possibly be effective in short headlines sometimes, but not in body copy.

I do find myself wondering about the creative processes involved when an advert in a campaign that eulogises the literary creativity of the Irish Mind includes an un-sentence like: “Better and faster.” No doubt the agency pitch was something along the lines of: “the unfettered creative celtic spirits of today’s Ireland pay no heed to the narrow-minded strictures of your so-called grammatical rules! Think of the unique cadences of Hiberno-English! Think of capturing that in a forceful written expression of the Passion To Succeed! Think Joyce! Think Beckett!”

What I think of is posting a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves to the copywriter...