The short version: Copywriting is one word, no hyphen, no “e” after the “t”, not “copywrighting” and definitely not “copyrighting” (that’s a legal term for protecting intellectual property). Get the spelling right, but don’t stop there, because the mistakes that lose you clients and money are almost never about spelling at all.
Copywriting: the correct spelling, once and for all
C-O-P-Y-W-R-I-T-I-N-G. One word. No hyphen. No apostrophe. The confusion comes from the fact that English has handed us three different words that sound almost identical and mean three completely different things.
- Copywriting, writing persuasive text for adverts, websites, emails, and sales pages. This is the job I do.
- Copyrighting, claiming legal ownership over creative work, as in “she copyrighted her novel.” Different word, different job, different profession entirely.
- Copywrighting, this one isn’t a word at all, but it turns up constantly because people blend “copywriting” with “wright,” as in shipwright or playwright. There’s no such job as a copywright.
The Wikipedia entry on copywriting gets this distinction right, and if you’re ever unsure, that’s a decent place to double-check before it goes on your website nav bar.
The typo I still think about
Years ago I did a quick audit for a small consultancy in Manchester who’d hired a freelancer to write their entire site. The main navigation menu, in the top banner, on every single page, said “Copywrighting Services.” Not a footer typo you could miss. The headline of their entire business offering.
Nobody on their team had caught it in six months. Their web developer hadn’t caught it. I only spotted it because I was scrolling through the site on my phone waiting for a coffee. When I mentioned it, the founder went quiet for a second and then said, “We’ve been sending that link to investors.”
That’s the real cost of a spelling mistake in this trade. It’s not that people think less of your grammar. It’s that you’re selling writing services, and the one word describing what you do is wrong on your own homepage. It undermines the entire pitch in three seconds flat.
Other spelling mixups that trip people up constantly
Once you’ve nailed “copywriting,” there’s a small cluster of related words that get mangled just as often:
- Freelance not “free lance” (two words is archaic and reads oddly now, even though it’s technically where the phrase came from).
- Portfolio not “porfolio”, I have seen this on a LinkedIn headline.
- Testimonial not “testomonial” or “testimonal”, autocorrect won’t always save you here because both look plausible at a glance.
- Its vs it’s, “the brand lost its voice” versus “it’s losing money.” Mixing these up in client work is the single fastest way to make an editor distrust every other sentence you’ve written.
The grammar mistakes that quietly kill credibility
Spelling gets caught by spellcheck most of the time. Grammar mistakes slide through because the words are all spelled correctly, they’re just arranged badly. These are the ones I see most in copy that clients send me to fix:
- Dangling modifiers. “Having worked in marketing for ten years, the campaign was a success.” No, the campaign didn’t work in marketing for ten years, you did. Fix: “Having worked in marketing for ten years, I made the campaign a success.”
- Passive voice everywhere. “Mistakes were made” instead of “we made mistakes.” Passive voice is fine occasionally, but in sales copy it drains the energy out of every sentence.
- Comma splices. “We deliver results, we don’t just talk about them” needs a full stop, a semicolon, or the word “and” in there, not a comma pretending to do a full stop’s job.
- Overqualifying with adverbs. “Very,” “really,” “quite,” and “somewhat” pile up in first drafts and rarely survive a good edit. Strong copy tends to use stronger verbs instead of propping up weak ones.
If you want a fast way to tighten this kind of writing without hiring an editor for every single email, my piece on how to become an effective business writer walks through the specific habits that separate readable copy from copy people skim past.
Where the real money gets lost: pricing mistakes
This is the part most spelling-and-grammar articles skip entirely, and it’s the part that determines whether you make a living from this.
UK freelance copywriters commonly charge anywhere from £250 to £600 a day depending on experience and niche, or between 10p and £1 per word for shorter pieces like product descriptions and social captions. Long-form sales pages and email sequences often go per project instead, typically £300 to £1,500 depending on complexity and the client’s budget.
The mistake I see constantly, and one I made myself in my early years, is quoting per word for work that should be quoted per project. I once spent four hours on a 400 word landing page for a client, because the strategy behind those 400 words took far longer than the typing. At 50p a word that was £200 for four hours of work, which is a wage nobody survives on. Once I switched to project-based pricing that accounted for the thinking time, not just the typing time, my income for the same workload roughly doubled within a year.
If you’re weighing up copywriting as a genuine income stream rather than a side hustle, it’s worth reading through how to make money online for a wider view of where freelance writing sits compared to other options, and internet based jobs you can do entirely from home for the practical side of setting this up as remote work.
The pitching mistakes nobody wants to name
Here’s the part that makes copywriters uncomfortable: perfect grammar does not get you hired. I’ve reviewed hundreds of pitches over the years, and the ones with flawless spelling and zero personality lose out constantly to the slightly rough, slightly typo-prone pitch that understands the client’s problem.
Clients don’t hire you to pass an English exam. They hire you to sell more of whatever they’re selling. A copywriter who writes “your open rates are dropping because your subject lines all sound the same, here’s three that would have stopped me scrolling” with one small typo in the middle will beat a copywriter who sends a grammatically pristine but generic pitch nine times out of ten. I’ve watched this happen in my own inbox. The specific, slightly imperfect email always wins over the polished, empty one.
That doesn’t mean spelling doesn’t matter, it means it matters less than most writing advice pretends it does. Fix your typos, obviously, but don’t confuse a clean pitch with a persuasive one. They’re not the same skill.
Small tweaks that fix most of these mistakes at once
You don’t need a proofreading degree to catch most of what I’ve listed above. A short, repeatable process does most of the work:
- Read the piece out loud. Dangling modifiers and comma splices announce themselves the second you say them.
- Search the document for “copywrighting” and “copyrighting” specifically if you write about your own services often. I do this before every proposal now, out of habit, since Manchester.
- Cut every “very,” “really,” and “quite” and see if the sentence still works. It almost always does, and it’s usually stronger.
- Read the last line first. If your closing sentence doesn’t push someone toward a decision, no amount of clean grammar higher up will save the piece.
- Get someone outside the industry to read your headline out loud. If they stumble on “copywriting” or ask what it means, your positioning has a bigger problem than a typo.
Small wording changes compound faster than people expect. If you want the specific, low-effort version of this for a website rather than a pitch email, 5 tiny content tweaks for big conversion boosts covers exactly the kind of small fix that moves a page’s performance without a full rewrite.
Frequently asked questions
Is it copywriting or copy writing, one word or two?
Copywriting is one word when referring to the profession of writing persuasive marketing and advertising content. “Copy writing” as two words technically still describes the same activity in casual sentences, but the standard, professional spelling used in job titles, portfolios, and industry contexts is one word.
What is the difference between copywriting and copyrighting?
Copywriting is writing text designed to sell or persuade, used in ads, websites, and emails. Copyrighting refers to the legal process of registering or claiming ownership over a creative work, and it has nothing to do with writing marketing content.
What is the most common mistake new copywriters make besides spelling?
Pricing per word for work that requires strategic thinking rather than straightforward typing, which leaves experienced writers underpaid for the value they deliver. Charging per project instead, once you understand the true time cost of a piece, fixes this quickly.
Does bad grammar in a pitch always lose you the client?
Not always, and often not at all. Clients hire copywriters to solve business problems, and a sharp, specific pitch with a minor typo regularly beats a grammatically flawless but generic one. Spelling matters, but relevance and specificity matter more.
