Tips for Better E-Mail, Part 4: Remove the Recipient!

When writing an important e-mail—one that you’re sure will be seen by a lot of people, even unintended ones—draft and revise with an empty recipient box. Enter the recipients only after you've carefully edited your message. This safety precaution will ensure that you don’t embarrass yourself by prematurely pressing send .


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Tips for Better E-Mail, Part 3: Check Those Fragments

Done.
Got it.
Just a thought.
Looking forward to it.
Nice meeting you again.
See you tomorrow.
Talk to you then.
To update.

In checking my e-mail inbox and, admittedly, outbox over the past week, I found the eight fragments above posturing as sentences. Of course, many of us—even at the highest levels of organizations—have written such statements in e-mails when we've believed that our readers would understand them in the context of our message. Therefore, only a grammar snob would cringe at the sight of these phrases.

My only concern with fragmented writing is that employees who solely write e-mails may not know better when called upon to write a formal document, say a white paper, proposal, technical report, or standard operating procedure. Believe me: Many times, participants in my writing seminars express surprise when I tell them that such phrases are sentence fragments and, as such, unacceptable in formal documentation.

Keep your fragments for those informal situations, and raise the bar when writing memos, letters, and reports—and even those e-mails you expect to be widely read.


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: https://www.firstbooks.com/product_info.php?cPath=14&products_id=144

Tips for Better E-Mail, Part 2: Don’t Cry Wolf!

Continuing what will be an extended, but sporadic, series on e-mail writing tips, I offer with this installment two more don’ts, both of them which we can associate with the aphorism “Don’t cry wolf!”

First, don’t unnecessarily escalate the importance option. In Microsoft Outlook, we may select among three options—low, normal, and high—to prioritize the message for our reader. Your default setting should be normal or to disable the option altogether. Think about it: If you choose low, then why are you even bothering to write the busy recipient? If you always choose high, then no one will take seriously your real emergencies when they arise.

Second, don’t abuse the the sensitivity option. Also in Outlook, we have four sensitivity options: normal, personal, private, and confidential. Again, your default should be normal or to disable the option. No work-related e-mail is ever entirely personal, private, or confidential—so why bother with the option, unless the reader and you have a clear understanding about the meaning of these sensitivity levels?


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Tips for Better E-Mail, Part 1: Don’t Track What You Don’t Have To

I have just completed a draft of my book The Art of Writing E-Mail as a companion piece to The Art of On-the-Job Writing. Since First Books (http://www.firstbooks.com/) will publish it later this spring, I thought I’d mark the occasion by focusing on tips for writing e-mail.

This first suggestion actually comes from Toby M. Sherman, Director of Professional Development at Common Ground Community, a New York-based innovative organization committed to solving homelessness (http://www.commonground.org/). Ms. Sherman urges her staff not to use the tracking setting listed on Microsoft Outlook as “request a delivery receipt for this message.” This feature, she insists, achieves the opposite effect of its intention: It can annoy the recipient to the point of making a response a low priority.

I have asked two other human resources professionals from entirely different fields (investment banking and government) if they felt the same way as Ms. Sherman. Their answer was a resounding “yes.” So here’s a tip you can take to the communications bank: Don’t track what you don’t have to!


To purchase your copy of The Art of On-the-Job Writing by Philip Vassallo, click here: https://www.firstbooks.com/product_info.php?cPath=14&products_id=144