Make your emails work for you

May 7 2009 by Lewis Harrison, The Journal

ON A typical day most of us must receive close to a hundred emails, if not more. Amongst them will be the latest deals on Viagra tablets, something ‘hilarious’ featuring a cat and, occasionally, something of genuine importance.

Yep, we’re all suffering from email overload. Yet few people seem to help one another by doing something as crazy as, oh, I don’t know, MAKING THEIR MESSAGE EASY TO UNDERSTAND.

So, in an unashamedly selfish bid to save myself some wasted time in future, here are a few pointers.

1. Get to the point. The person you are emailing is short on time. So don’t hide the whole point of your email below reams and reams of text. Instead, start with the most important information, and work your way down to less important stuff. That way, they can decide if your email is relevant to them.

2. Be concise. In their seminal text on writing plain English, The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr and EB White wrote: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that … a machine [should have] no unnecessary parts.”

3. Be clear. If the whole of your email isn’t easy to understand, it won’t be very effective. Make sure your subject line is pertinent, avoid acronyms unless they’re widely understood (or spell them out first) and if you really must drone on and on, use sub-headings so your reader can decipher your message.

4. Use short sentences and paragraphs. Our eyes find it harder to read words on a screen than those written on paper. To combat this, try to keep your paragraphs and sentences short.

5. Don’t be afraid to use exclamation marks. That’s right! Misunderstandings are common in email communications. While you think you’ve jokingly told your boss she’s a humorous old soul, she thinks you’ve called her a weird freak of nature with no friends.

The occasional exclamation mark in an email lets your recipient know you’re making a light-hearted, jokey comment.

6. Check before you send. Finally, take a moment before you send your email to make two important checks. First, have you been as clear as possible? If not, tinker until you have.

And second, does everyone you’re sending the email to really need to be copied in? Remember: everything irrelevant you send someone makes them less effective at what they should be doing, and less likely to respond to you in future.

Lewis Harrison is communications manager at Codeworks, the North East’s centre for digital innovation.