Clarity Is King

Anyone who deals with a lot of email conversations will know how much the clarity of your email means (and especially the clarity of the email you receive). Let’s face it, some people just don’t know how to write good emails. And to define a “good and well formed email” one would have to:

• be organized into logical “chunks” of information
• use proper typographical aids (such as characters, white space, paragraphs, etc.)
• have an intro and an outro (meaning to start and end with a greeting)
• convey as much needed information in as less as possible wording – no noise please

So in your email communication you shouldn’t come off as rude just so your email would be short, but you shouldn’t write encyclopedia-like emails as well. Try to be clear, but not to sound too “formal”. Remember – it’s an email, people need the info, and they shouldn’t have to spend their time looking for it in your email.

I found it that email typographic “rules” such as lengths of paragraphs and aforementioned whitespace don’t and shouldn’t apply to email. I believe every thought, or respective “chunk” of co-related information should be in it’s “block of text” or a paragraph if you will. That way you can organize the thought stream and help people read and understand your email more easily.

Replying To Emails

Some people say that inline replying is bad, I say use it when you think it is the clearest form of a reply – for instance when replying to an email with a lot of non-numbered bullet-points. I usually reply above the quote (the email I’m replying to), and that’s the way I like to receive replies – because I am not interested in seeing the “replied-to” email first. Also make sure your email client is set to not include every single email from the conversation as a thread in every reply. That way you end up with really long emails that are just annoying. Another thing concerns attachments – they have no place in the thread – make sure your email client leaves them as attachments and doesn’t force them into replies.

Signatures – The Plague of Email

Ah, the sigs… It is required by some companies that their employees note in every email that their views don’t necessarily comply with that of the company, yada, yada, yada. Ok, I understand that, but please keep it short. On a daily basis I receive emails that have signatures longer than the content of the message itself! That is just ridiculous, note only the essential info in the signature, name, address, maybe a couple of other things if you find them necessary.

Still one of the most important things when talking about email correspondence is the way a thought is put into words. Some people are really bad at this – I understand writing doesn’t exactly come like second nature to most people, but it is unavoidable for you to learn to put your thoughts into words as clearly as possible if you are having this problem. It saves time (not just your’s, but other people’s as well) and makes other people’s lives easier when working with you.