Write It Well

The Alexander Communications Group has written an article for its current Customer Communicator newsletter that quotes Write It Well President Natasha Terk on the importance of carefully written e-mail.

The article includes five important questions that professionals should keep in mind as they write e-mail to customers. Check out the article here for more tips on how employees and managers can make sure outgoing e-mail reflects well on their company’s image!

MBA students’ … writing and presentation skills have been a perennial complaint. Employers and writing coaches say business-school graduates tend to ramble [and] use pretentious vocabulary.

•

Many businesspeople hold on to very bad writing habits from our school years.

As students, most of us tried using rambling prose to make papers long enough. Most of us also tried using pretentious vocabulary to compensate for skimpy homework.

Both  tactics can be disastrous in business writing. Countless times at Write It Well, businesspeople have told us they want to read clear, concise documents that get straight to the point.

•

•

•

For entire chapters on clarity and concision in business writing, see our book Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide.

Please e-mail Write It Well or call us at (510) 655-6477 to find out how our customized trainings and line of books can help your organization and all its writers communicate more clearly and concisely.

Or if you have an important document that you don’t feel confident sending out, our editors can help you deliver your message effectively in prose that feels effortless to read.

•

When sending rapid-fire e-mails back and forth across the office, it’s fine to write one-line messages. Those messages don’t even have to be complete sentences. When you know your audience well, sentence fragments can be efficient and effective. Take a look at these very effective incomplete sentences:

• To consider at today’s meeting: deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.
• Monday, March 6–OK.
• Sure–when we get budget approval.

Just be sure to be quite clear. Sentence fragments can be ambiguous, sound overly blunt, or give your reader the impression that your message isn’t important. Like I wrote in my previous post, sometimes saving space wastes time. Just keep your audience clearly in view.

For more tips on keeping e-mail efficient and effective with sentence fragments, check out chapter four in E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide.

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.

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.

To really get your idea across, reach for the phone AND your computer. The phone adds urgency and personality to your e-mail, while an e-mail can quickly convey and store detailed or complicated information. Your goal is to keep your correspondents from having to jot down notes on the phone, while letting them know that your message is important enough for a phone call.

The order — phone first or later — depends on your message. It may be most effective to send an e-mail with all the information, adding, “I’ll call you on Thursday to hear your opinion.” Or, you can use your phone call to cover the basics, adding, “I’ll e-mail you with the details of our conversation.”

Along with seventeen other people, I got an e-mail message last week from a project manager asking for my opinion about a certain course of action. She asked everyone to cast their vote. So…guess what happened? Everyone voted. But they sent their vote to all seventeen people.

I don’t know about you, but when I get seventeen e-mail messages about a particular topic, my eyes start to glaze over and I stop paying attention or even reading the messages. If something important comes up, I will probably miss it.

This is a highly educated, professional group of people. Youmight have thought that these people should have been smart enough not to hit “Reply All,” but that’s not really the problem. Maybe you thought that there was no other way to know what other people thought or how they cast their vote. That’s not true. There are ways to keep everyone in the loop without generating unnecessary e-mail messages.

The problem is that the project manager didn’t tell us toreply directly to her, not to all seventeen people. In this case, she could have saved the production of 289 more e-mail messages by collecting the votes andsending a message back to the group to announce which strategy got the most votes and other important points that might have come up. No one would have missed anything that way or been left “out of the loop.” They would have received fewer e-mail messages that way.

Remember that if you’re sending an e-mail to a large group, it is your responsibility to tell them how to respond. If you don’t specify, they are likely to “Reply All.”