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Wired How To's
Write a perfect email

Email, not the web, is the most-used Internet
application by transaction volume. It\s also the
most misused. Since it\s such an important and
often overlooked component of our online lives,
I\m going to step away from preaching about the
web for a moment and focus on simple steps to
make your email discussions more effective.

If you grew up like I did, you were taught how to
write a letter. You learned how to write business
and casual headings and salutations, state your
purpose, make a request, set expectations for a
response, and wrap it up with a Very Truly Yours.

But an email is not a letter, and you\re not
typing at a Selectric II typewriter. You may look
at the days of formal graces in written
communication with some sadness, but rest assured
that they are as dead as Dillinger. If your
purpose is to solicit information or action from
another person via email, you must make that
clear to them at the earliest possible point in the message.

I get hundreds of emails a day, not counting
spam. I know I\m not alone. Email overload is a
problem, and it will probably only get worse.

It\s tempting for geeks like me to propose some
kind of microformat as a solution: begin subjects
with these words, format the first line like
that. But email is too widely distributed to
corral into a any kind of structure now. All we
can do is focus on quick, concise, effective communication.

People differ in how they manage their inboxes,
but attention to a few details can help make your
messages more usable for everyone. These are the
factors I\ve identified that will help you get a quick and valid response:
Brevity
It\s the soul of wit, you know.

Short emails rule. When I get an email that\s
several pages long, I have to make some
decisions: do I have time to handle this now? Is
it important enough to come back to? Can I pass
it on to someone else? If I can\t say yes to any
of these, I will probably never get back to it.

You may have lots of information to share, but in
email you are in a long list of others competing
for your recipient\s attention. Keeping it brief
is a sign of respect, and it\s less likely to
cause added stress to your reader.

Supporting material or other important info can
be attached, but keep it separate from who you
are, what your issue is, and what you want from me.

If you\re passing a thread along, trim what isn\t
needed. Why make the email look longer than it really is?

Context
If I don\t know you by name, tell me how you came
to contact me. We talked about mixers at a
podcasting meetup. You saw a panel I was on last
year. You divorced me and married my best friend
from high school. Something I would remember. I
don\t need or want a resume, but I do need to know where you\re coming from.
Getting a lot of responses asking, ]What do you
mean?^ Context is your problem. When you\re
asking a question, anticipate any missing details
that could cause an extended back-and-forth. Each
time someone sends you a reply, you\ve gone to
the back of that person\s line. Do what you can
to make your emails count the first time.

And for god\s sake, have a subject line. One that
makes sense. Some of the most important emails
I\ve received didn\t have a subject, and they
almost fell through as a result. Don\t waste that
space with words like ]Important^ or ]Re: Re: Re:
Re: Re:^. If the topic changes, change the
subject line to match it. Remember that on
recipients\ screens, your subject competes with a
large number of others for their attention.

Old-school email users have a tendency to trim
everything out of the body of an email except
their replies. Don't do this. For example, if you
send me an invitation to speak at a conference
and I ask what the topic is, you might reply with
just the topic, snipping out all the details of
the conference. If I've forgotten about your
email by the time you reply, this means that I've
got to go back through an enormous email archive
to find your original message in order to figure
out what you're talking about. Even if I
remember, it means that I no longer have the
details to hand. Don't trim email. Let it run
long. It's the 21st century: an email with an
extra 10k of old text at the bottom of it isn't
going to swamp my mailer (the 20,000 daily spams
are doing that very nicely, thank you).

Something to act on
Make your requests clear.

You should set them apart from the rest of the
message by paring them down to one sentence, with
white space before and after. Make lists with
dashes, asterisks, or bullets if you use HTML
email. Closed-ended (yes or no, this or that)
questions are preferred; open-ended questions can
get long and involved, reducing their overall
relevancy and the likelihood that you\ll get the response you desire.
Don\t give people an excuse to misread you. If
you\ve written a request at the end of a long
paragraph, or been passive (]it\d be nice if
somebody couldU^), it\s likely to have been
missed on the receiver\s end. If you sent an
email, you have a point. Get to it.

Some examples:

Can I call you tomorrow morning at 10am PT?
Here is my contact info for your address book.
Would you send me any links you have where I can read more about x? Would you forward this to person y?
I need your travel itinerary by end of day.
Reasonable expectations
Given that most of us have several current
projects to keep up on, it\s not very likely that
we\re be able to spend more than 10 minutes at a
time helping someone who is emailing me out of
the blue. My ability to draft my famous
page-scrolling expositions of a given issue is
limited. If I\ve already written something that
covers it, I might just send you a link.
Otherwise, if you can frame the question such
that a lengthy answer isn\t required, you\re apt to get a quicker response.
A deadline
There comes a time when the response you seek is
no longer useful. If you know when that is, tell
your recipient. This can be a good way both to
prompt a speedy turnaround, and to let people off
the hook in the long term. When someone sees
that, for example, you need a proposal in a
timeframe they can\t make, they will probably bow
out, rather than leaving you hanging. Everybody
wins. Especially whoever it is you end up choosing in their place.
You can\t win them all. If you need to send a
single reminder, do so, but if that doesn\t do
the trick, pick up a phone. If it\s not important
enough to call the person directly, then let it go.

Daily reminders suggest to recipients that
they\re being bossed around, and that\s not the
best way to manage people, and certainly no way
to treat casual contacts. They may be too busy,
or away from the computer, or actually working on
your last request. If you\re forcing the issue,
you don\t improve your chances of success with that person in the long term.


Created by swr_10016@hidden on Sep 4 1:29pm.
Updated by accounts@hidden on Sep 8 9:08pm.

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