Professional Copywriting

Archive for January, 2012

When writing fiction or for emotional effect, never underestimate the power of your reader’s imagination.

Someone once challenged Ernest Hemmingway to tell an entire story with no more than six words. His reply: For sale: baby shoes, never used

I once had a boss who told us that when he received emails he read the subject line and the first line of the body. If he wasn’t convinced the message was important by that point, he hit delete. He meant it too. I was once standing next to him while he was cleaning out his email In Box. He highlighted every message in the box , most of which were marked as unread, and then hit the delete button. Convince people that your email is worth reading at the very beginning. Otherwise you may never convince them.

Ernest Hemingway’s Rules for Good Writing:
1. Use short sentences.
2. Use short first paragraphs.
3. Use vigorous English.
4. Be positive, not negative.
5. Never have only 4 rules.

A few things to note:

First of all Hemingway had a sense of humor about his writing. (See rule 5.)
Secondly, Hemingway didn’t take his rules too seriously. Although he is famous for his short sentences, if you go through his writing you can find some extremely long sentences mixed in with his more famous short ones. Never lets rules become handcuffs.

George Orwell’s Rules for Good Writing:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.