Write It Well

“Most people could cut their email output by ten percent or so and maintain or even increase their productivity,” writes Art Carden. Messages to cut:

• Questions you could answer for yourself. See what Google has to say before you send an e-mail that makes you look silly and wastes time.
• Responses to e-mails that CC you. Often, these e-mails are just informative, and don’t need an answer from you.
• Forwards. Yes, it’s a noble cause. So why don’t you take the time to compose your own personal, thought-provoking e-mail, and send THAT to your friends? They’ll appreciate it much more.

E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide has more great tips on boosting your e-mail effectiveness.

Some e-mail clients let you mark your e-mail as “urgent” or “high-priority.” Generally, you’re better off using a descriptive subject line to get your reader’s attention. An e-mail marked “URGENT” looks loud and pushy. Every now and then, loud and pushy may be exactly what you need. But don’t let yourself get comfortable with sending urgent messages (or crying wolf, for that matter) — it doesn’t look particularly professional.

Be especially careful when you forward an “urgent” e-mail. Your forward will also be marked “urgent,” when it probably isn’t.

I can spend hours composing careful e-mails, and minutes deciding whether to archive an e-mail or leave it in my inbox. If e-mail takes up too much of your time, try these tricks for keeping it under control:

• Decide how often you’ll check your e-mail, and stick to it. If necessary, shut down your e-mail application so it doesn’t alert you when new e-mail arrives.
• Use e-mail as a transitional activity between meetings or other tasks. That way, you can’t spend too much time on any one e-mail task.
• Plan your schedule so you check your e-mail while having coffee, or just before lunch, when you’re hungry. This trick helps me stay alert, eager to finish, and decisive.

For more tips on managing e-mail, check out Chapter 3 in E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.

From e-mail to blog posts to website content, much of our business writing these days is “clickable.” There are several ways to put links in your text. Which linking style looks most professional? I’m not going to focus on the technical part of making links — which is usually as simple as clicking a menu button. Instead, I’m going to talk about the phrasing.

One of the ugliest ways to include a link is this: CLICK HERE!! By all means, avoid the words “click here,” and particularly avoid capital letters. Readers know how to follow a link. Saying “click here” (1) wastes words, (2) doesn’t tell the reader anything about the linked site, and (3) smacks of spam advertising.

The more contemporary understated version of “CLICK HERE” is to incorporate direction words into the flow of your text. For example: You can find a linguistics blog here, and food writers here, here, and here. While much better than “click here,” direction-word links are a little bit coy: they force the reader to click on them before knowing exactly where they lead. In informal contexts, they’re acceptable, but don’t rely on “here” when writing something really impressive.

The best way to format links is to incorporate them unobtrusively in the sentence. For your link text, choose a word or phrase that refers specifically to the topic of the linked page. For example, link a company name to its website, link a confusing word to its Wikipedia page, and link to any reference when you mention it. Should you link the whole phrase? Or just the main word? That’s up to you. Just be consistent.

One more thing: avoid putting two different links next to each other. A reader won’t necessarily know that each word goes to a separate page!

How to start? Liz Danzico, the information architect and blogger at Bobulate, thinks that e-mail salutations have three basic purposes. In “Anatomy of a Salutation,”  she writes that salutations not only function as greetings, but set tone and establish a hierarchy between writers. More interesting, she notes that e-mail salutations evolve fairly quickly during back-and-forth correspondence. Most e-mail threads start out formal (“Dear Professor Miles”), but by the third e-mail the correspondents often drop to an informal “Hi,” or no greeting at all.

When writing a salutation, follow your correspondent’s cues. You’ll look stuffy and cold if you return a “Hey Charlie” with a “Dear Mr. Bowers,” and you could easily insult someone by using only their first  name. I like to check my correspondents signatures — if they sign only a first name, I can use only their first name, and if they sign their full name, I address them by their title and last name.

For more advice on writing business e-mail, check out E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.

When Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang got to work writing an e-mail about layoffs, he made some serious blunders. Which was worse — the fact that he sounded patronizing and euphemistic, or that he only used his SHIFT key twice, to make the exclamation point in “yahoo!”?

From his e-mail: “having layoffs is very difficult, particularly in light of all we’ve experienced this year.  but we don’t take these decisions lightly.” Whether he intended it or not, lowercase letters always look a little bit lazy. Sometimes that lowercase laziness looks sleek, hip, and  perfect for a techie marketing campaign — but nobody wants to be laid off by a sleek, hip, lazy boss. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Probably Mr. Yang thought his lowercase e-mail looked approachable. Too bad he further obscured his message with roundabout business talk:

“we understand that hearing this news now creates uncertainty, but we are moving ahead in a way that balances speed with a clear focus on accomplishing what is necessary to set the organization up for long term success,” he wrote. I’m quite sure he knows that “a clear focus on accomplishing what is necessary to set the organization up for long term success” means deciding which employees to lay off. But he didn’t write that. He tried to hide the bad news.

The sad truth is that bad news takes guts to deliver. Coincidentally enough, Yahoo!’s own written guidelines for layoffs are right on the mark:

• Get right to the point.
• Don’t own the employee’s feelings.
• Be clear, concise, and respectful.

Nobody likes to write difficult e-mails. Effective communication skills help us write e-mail that gets the job done and looks professional. Check out Write It Well’s guide to e-mail for more tips on effective writing.

I was browsing through a PostSecret collection today when I read a postcard from someone who confessed waiting several days to respond to friends’ e-mails.  Just to seem busier. Most of us are probably guilty of postponing a response for similar reasons, but does e-mail delay actually make us look busier or more glamorous? 

I thought back to delayed e-mails I’d received — delayed e-mails from writers who certainly weren’t overwhelmingly busy. Had they just taken the time to compose a thoughtful reply? Were they apathetic? Bored? I compared their e-mails to prompt replies. The prompt replies usually came from professionals, and were followed by prompt action on my part. The delayed responses simply got buried in my inbox.

If you want to project a professional image, reply as soon as you are able. Certainly, reply thoughtfully and carefully. But I find that it’s much harder to respond if I’ve let an e-mail sit for a few days.

For more guidance on how to write effective e-mail, check out E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.

Why do we give workshops on “E-Mail Efficiency” instead of “E-Mail Etiquette” like other people do? The short answer: our workshops cover more material. To use e-mail most effectively, of course you need proper e-mail etiquette. You won’t get much done with offensive, boring, or badly-timed messages! But you also need to know how to keep a tidy inbox, for example, and how to write persuasive e-mail messages — not to mention the nitty-gritty details of professional grammar and clean prose.

Write It Well works with your company to tailor an interactive e-mail workshop to your specific needs and strengths. We train your company to write e-mail that gets your work done in less time. That’s efficiency!

If Google had its way, you would never delete e-mail, let alone file it. Google got rid of the old filing cabinet analogy for e-mail when they introduced GMail, which lets you archive everything and easily search for it later. No folders, no files, no trash.

What about confidential e-mail? The “delete immediately” e-mail with jokes about the boss’s son and inside trading tips? Sorry. Confidential e-mail doesn’t exist, and never has. GMail just makes it a bit more clear that every careless e-mail is carved in electronic stone. Even deleted e-mail. In 2006, a judge requested deleted e-mail held on Google’s servers — and got it. If you want to talk about something confidential or offensive, don’t write an e-mail.

“CC” originally meant “carbon copy,” but what does it mean now that the Internet has replaced carbon paper? Carbon copies — for those of us who remember — were thin, poor-quality reproductions of an original document. You sent a carbon copy to interested people who didn’t need to reply, unlike the intended recipient, who got the original. Electronically, CC works like this: everyone can see all the addresses in the CC field, and if any recipient hits “reply to all,” their message goes to all the original recipients AND everyone in the CC field.

When you are CC’d in an e-mail, go ahead and file the e-mail if you like. The author made no secret that you were looking at the e-mail, and felt that you would find its message relevant. If you’d like to respond, however, think carefully before choosing “reply to all”. Send your message only to people who really need to have your response.

For more tips on using e-mail in the workplace, check out E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.