A recent survey by Information Mapping Inc. found that 34% of respondants indicated that they wasted between 30 and 60 minutes a day reading badly written emails.
Typical failings included:
- recipient is not clear as to what should be done or how to act on the information
- content is disorganized
- critical information is missing or hard to find, and
- content is too long, wordy and difficult to read.
So here are my top ten tips for better email messages:
- A clear, strong subject line helps people prioritise their inboxes.
- If the subject of an email dialogue has changed, change the subject line but put the old subject (was: in brackets) after the new subject for continuity.
- Emails are more like telexes than letters. Imagine you are paying by the word. Don’t give the background, history, your life story. Stick to relevant facts and requests.
- Write well: strong, active verbs, avoid jargon and abbreviations, use fewer words.
- Punctuation exists to make it easier for people to make sense of what they’re reading. Emails that look like an EE Cummings poem with no punctuation, bad spelling and inappropriate capitalisation slow down people’s brains when they read and make it harder for them to understand what you are saying.
- One sentence per paragraph. This isn’t a college essay. Be succinct. People will skip the middle of a long paragraph. Using bullets to separate out lists is also helpful.
- For long emails use subtitles to break the email into sections like a magazine would.
- End strongly. Tell people exactly what you expect them to do as a result of the email.
- Wait a minute. Don’t send an email off the moment you’ve finished writing it. In fact, I generally don’t write the names of the recipients until I’ve finished the email to stop myself accidentally sending it. Why? Because it’s easy to be wordblinded by something you’ve just written.
- Edit. Re-read it. Out loud. Delete any unnecessary words. Think about whether you can express any point more clearly and succinctly. Check in with yourself to make sure you’re not going to piss anyone off by sending the email (it’s easy to write something snide in haste and regret it later).
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