My English literature teacher did not like Ernest Hemingway. Even in those days, when he was all but eulogised, she found his machismo repellent and, as a hater of cruelty to animals, his love of bullfighting placed him, as far as she was concerned, beyond the pale. Yet she constantly praised his writing style.

He changed creative writing from a rather florid style to one that read easily, yet was full of meaning. His ‘one true sentence’ is often quoted, and almost as often misunderstood, but for us it should be the one guiding principle for email marketing copy. Get your message over in one sentence.

He once said something along the lines of big emotions don’t require big words, meaning that you can convey everything in short sharp sentences that are easily grasped by readers. This works more for us.

Subscribers often glance at copy and anything that requires them to think about its meaning is an anathema to email marketing. Keeping it simple is a dogma we should follow. Work out what you want to say, say it, and don’t bother saying it again.

Hemingway wrote literature. We email marketing copywriters are not in the same job, yet we do try to convey meaning, particularly emotion, by the use of words, and that’s what Hemingway did. He did it in a way that we can usefully mimic.

My English teacher had a green pen, the colour chosen to contrast with her normal royal blue of suggestion, comment, and criticism, so you knew it was something serious. Adjectives and adverbs that added nothing to the narrative would guarantee its use.

She told us, often in green ink, that if the word you’d chosen needed a modifier, we’d chosen the wrong word. She put me off green ink.

If you want your next email marketing campaign to grab your subscribers, go through the copy and remove any word that is not vital. Anything with three syllables needs justification. Read some Hemingway and you will recognise the style of current writers, as most mimic him. And so should you.