Listener Generosa writes in: How can I teach people to write organized, professional, and to-the-point emails? I continually receive emails from students, colleagues, and family members that are unintelligible.
We all love email! No, we don’t. We hate it. We hate getting it. But we love to give it. And if we’re going to give it, let’s learn how to give it right. Because thoughtless email can make a bad impression, and even leave your recipients with more work, just to get to the email in the first place. But you’ll be above all that—you’ll be the Amazing Person Everyone Wants to Hear Form—if you compose your email from the reader’s point of view.
Europa is secretly the supreme overlord of the Eastern Bloc, a very demanding job to fit in between her day job working in disguise as a cashier at the Green Growing Things plant store. So she’s decided to take a well-deserved vacation. She’s appointed her son Thomas as Chief Minion to take over her work email account while she’s away. It’s daunting! Europa receives thousands of emails per day, and they all seem to require an immediate response. And they’re all so poorly written. Thomas is about to get a crash course in writing good emails, by swimming through an avalanche of bad ones. (“Swimming through an avalanche.” I like that. I’m mixing my metaphors like a sleeping cat in a downhill ski competition.)
Use Strong Subject Lines
When Thomas opens up his email client, he sees only the subject lines of incoming emails. Thousands of subject lines. And they all say one thing: “Meeting?”
“Meeting for what?” cries Thomas. “Meeting for coffee or meeting for world domination? Or worse, maybe, just maybe, it’s… ” (he shudders) “a status meeting.” This subject line gives him no way of organizing the incoming mail.
A strong subject line, however, will help. Writing a strong subject line is different from titling your self-punished autobiography or naming your new tech start-up that you assure investors is “like Uber for aquatic birds.” Bad subject lines are ambiguous, raise more questions than they answer, or they introduce a new subject without depth. Good subject lines, on the other hand, are clear and to the point. They summarize the body of the email instead of just introducing it. They make you look like a star, since your reader knows what the message is about and can organize it where it goes in their workflow.
Never assume the reader of your email has any context for your message. In many cases they really don’t. And even if they were supposed to, they might have forgotten it entirely. The subject line, along with your name, is the first thing someone sees when you send them an email, and that alone will decide when (or if) they open it. It’s your responsibility as an email master to tell them exactly why you’re clogging up their inbox.
Make sure you let the recipient of each email knows what the email is about by using more than a single word. Instead of “Coffee rations,” Europa’s subjects would make a far better impression with a subject line of “Increase coffee rations now!” Instead of saying “Outrage!” if they took the time to write “Outraged at new manifesto font choice!” Thomas would immediately know that stopping coffee riots takes precedence over font choices and could deploy the Capitol Police accordingly.
Make Your Most Important Sentence Stand Out
Even if they open your email, many people scan your carefully crafted prose, rather than reading carefully. If that’s what they’re going to do, make it work for them.
When you take the time out of your day to sit down and write an email to someone, there’s usually a good reason for it. You have a burning question to ask, or some relevant information to pass on. Don’t bury your point in a sea of unimportant text. Instead, modify the text formatting to make your most important point stand out.
Europa gets hundreds of messages asking her to intervene in her subjects’ squabbles. One says, “Dear Europa, I hope this salutation finds you well. I am writing to you today to ask for your assistance with a personal grievance I have with my neighbor, Xorbak. Last week, Xorbak and I agreed to a fair trade in which I swapped two of my pigs for one of Xorbak’s cows. Xorbak has already used one of the pigs for a Lu’au. He says the pig was too fatty and the trade wasn’t kosher. Now, he wants his cow back. Please help.”
Even if they open your email, many people scan your carefully crafted prose, rather than reading carefully.
Thomas is ferklempt! After opening a hundred petitions in the last hour alone, he doesn’t know where to start. Should he ask why Xorbak of the Eastern Bloc is holding a Lu’au? Should he be addressing the finer points of Pareve? There’s a little too much going on in this message for him to skim it.
You should always be able to boil an email down to one statement or question that sums up why you’re sending it. Put that sentence in all-caps and bold type. If you’re feeling creative and have no sense of aesthetics, you can even knock the font size up a few notches and change the color of the text to something that will get the reader’s attention. Plus, add sparkles. Everybody loves sparkles!
No matter where this sentence is in the body of text, bold or all-caps draws the eye. It will likely be the first sentence someone reads when they open the email. Even if they’re just skimming, they’ll get the point immediately. Then, if they really want the context, they can go back and read your message from the beginning.
The farmer’s email could have been simply boiled down to an all-caps, bold sentence that says: “Hi Europa. PLEASE CONFIRM THAT TWO PIGS ARE, IN FACT, EQUAL TO ONE COW.”
Summarize Takeaways at the End of Your Email
People are only reading your email because there’s something they need to know, or something they need to do as a result. So make sure they know what that is. At the end of your message, summarize the takeaways in one place.
This is especially important when you’re in a multi-person conversation. If you’re in a thread with a whole bunch of other people, and you need each one of them to do something specific, make that part of the list. Now that it’s time for Thomas to start issuing orders resolving the conflicts, he can at least model this reader-oriented technique. He dashes off a quick email to his under-Minions, telling them what to do next.
He chooses a subject line “Today’s marching orders enclosed. Follow them or die.” This subject line gives enough context for the recipients to decide whether or not to open the message and read it. Notice that in a mere eight words, he makes a compelling case that this is an email worth opening.
Inside, he includes a few paragraphs discussing the day’s petitions and their resolutions. Knowing that his under-Minions will only be skimming, he bolds the single sentence halfway through, “To keep our promises to our loyal subjects, you must implement our most esteemed resolutions.” Then at the the end of the message, he includes a list of specific action items:
Minion 376: to resolve the coffee shortage, we will annex the coffee plantations of lower Ebonia. Tell the generals to prepare the tanks. Minion 853Z Set up a propaganda campaign about investing in coffee bonds. Minion 174: get me a double espresso shot macchiato.
With a simple open, scan, and glance at the to-do list, every recipient knows what the message is about and what they need to do. Is it any wonder that Europa (and now Thomas) inspires such loyalty in the troops?
Even if it feels like we send email all day to keep our fingers busy, sometimes we need the person on the other line to actually respond or do something based on the information we’ve provided. That is, we have a call to action or takeaway we expect the the reader to act on. Always put your takeaway at the very end of your email, so it’s the last thing your reader sees when they go to reply. If you have a question that needs answering, put that right at the end of your message too, just above your send-off. That way, the direct takeaway for your reader will be to answer that question.
Writing good email, from the recipient’s point of view, is a key to making a good impression and managing your far-flung empire. Use subject lines that allow a recipient to organize their inbox. Use bold and caps to highlight important points for Those Who Skim. And make sure your action items are clearly highlighted at the end of the message so everyone knows exactly what to do next.
Hopefully, listener Generosa’s colleagues will also take the hint, so they start to show up well in the world of email.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. I run programs to help people have Extraordinary Lives and extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com or join my personal mailing list by texting GETITDONE to 33444. You’ll also get a free copy of my secret book chapter on how to build relationships that help you succeed.
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