10 ms·

If you want to compose better emails, forget formatting. - practice making emails short. Write, then rewrite to 50% of original length, then try to make it eve

• hrktb 7y ago
  > if your email is an attempt to persuade someone, don't bother. I think this is completely accurate for most companies, and so sad at the same time. At a not so extreme point, this means people will pester anyone in a position to take decisions in any possible way. They'll stalk to steal minutes here and there for subjects that can be super complicated and context sensitive, but not important enough to have people stop everything they're doing. They'll book meetings on lunch times, over other meetings. They'll derail meetings because couldn't get a separate meeting. They'll get comments and stark looks because they're obnoxious but it's also the only way to get any decisions from their perspective, and at the end of the day they'll be vindicated as their projects move forward while others stay in the mud. It feels like hell on both sides of the stalking, I guess it's the price to pay when email or chat, or asynchronous communication is seen as a low tier channel.
  • jakubp 7y ago
    Yes, it's bad. In my experience it's because relatively low percentage of people in a typical org have enough trust to one another that they won't misinterpret the wrong way.
• Benjammer 7y ago
  Fwiw, I agree with you about speaking in person. I will say though, that I've started to encounter younger people now who will actually come right out and say "I don't do well with face to face conversations and I'd prefer to discuss this on Slack or in a Google Doc" and they somehow get management support for that. Maybe it's just my crazy company, but there seems to be some kind of thing going on where having any amount of social skills is no longer mandatory. And I'm not talking about awkward people who may be hard to talk to, I'm talking about people where you wouldn't realize anything is wrong and then they go complain to HR that they feel "put under too much pressure" by certain people in face to face conversations (it's not just me that get often reported for this, it's like half the engineers). It's not like they really "punish" anyone or anything for these ridiculous reports, but they also don't do anything to solve the issue of people refusing to talk face to face.
  • RHSeeger 7y ago
    I am not young, and I do better with asynchronous communication. I don't mind chatting on the phone when it makes sense to, but I generally prefer email; it gives me time to think through what I want to say and make sure it's communicated correctly. On the phone, I wind up going silent for a minute to think things through, and other people get uncomfortable because of the silence. Worth noting, it's not about social skills. It's about having the time to fully think through a complex issue and the information related to it. That just isn't possible during a synchronous conversation. You wind up having meetings where the things that get decided aren't the right things because people didn't have time to actually think through all the factors involved.
    • sak5sk 7y ago
      Sometimes it takes longer than a few minutes to think about something. I often write out my messages and not send them. Sleep on it, come back and delete to write something better. I've found myself in many situations where sleeping on an issue provides a much better, thorough and more clever solution than just blasting off an email. If I were to provide responses face to face, there's a good chance I'd be giving bad advice that may cost companies a lot of money.
    • jakubp 7y ago
      If you are on a team, and you know you need time & space to think things through, they should know it too (from you). It's your job to tell them, no? Then they either respect that and give you time when you need it, or don't. If they do, no issue. If they don't, they are going to go around you anyway whether you like it or not... just how work works.
  • 0xffff2 7y ago
    I sure hope it's just your company (any, it's not the case at mine). As someone who has difficulty communicating with people, I do anything important face-to-face if at all possible. I have enough trouble reading people as it is. I need all of the extra social cues I can get.
  • bscphil 7y ago
• snitko 7y ago
  This is the best advice.
• jasode 7y ago
  >if your email is an attempt to persuade someone, don't bother. Go talk to them. This really depends on the person being persuaded and the type of topic. For me (and I know many that agree), it's better to put a complex topic into an email than to walk up to people. Organize your thoughts, use bullet points, prioritize the most important things, add web links or other evidence to support your ideas. The problem is that when you just walk up to my desk or call me on the phone to talk about something complex, you're now forcing me to become your secretary and transcribe your notes. I'm now "writing out your email" that I would prefer you write yourself. That's not being respectful of my time. I can read at ~250 wpm; you can only talk at ~100 wpm. Yes, if it's something lightweight like you're trying to convince me to go to the Chinese restaurant instead of Italian for lunch, go ahead and talk to me instead of write up an email. Otherwise, please consider if the recipient of your complex topic wants to be your "secretary". I would be very curious of a survey that asked if people preferred to be convinced by coworkers talking to them instead of writing emails/reports with organized and coherent data. Would it be a minority or majority of respondents?
  • jakubp 7y ago
    I don't mean for this to be blunt, but since we're talking about work, if I want to persuade you of something, it's your job to listen to me, because my persuasion will be aimed at accomplishing company goals! So we are both on the clock here, not just you. I can also assure you I speak faster than I type, and so it's not just your end that counts. I'm also pretty sure I can say much fewer words with proper tone of voice to convey as much as 5x long email correctly, and a single word of your response and a look at your face as I speak will tell me more of what I should understand of your reaction than even the most elaborate written response... Persuasion and discussion isn't about me laying out my point clearly in a tidy format though, right? It's about mind-sharing, interaction, sensitivity, etc. Maybe we come from very different types of organizations? I have never, ever (!) in my 15+ year career been in a position where too many unprepared people forced me in any way to listen to their stupid / ill-prepared ideas.... [Edit] I'm also confused, how does someone coming up to talk to you forces you to write anything down?? (seriously I don't get that part :) )
    • 7y ago
• edouard-harris 7y ago
  I agree with all of this, except I've observed that written media can be extremely effective as a means of discussion. In meetings at our company, most of the material discussion takes place in writing before the in-person meeting even starts. The first ~10 minutes of a meeting are spent reading people's comments in silence until everyone is caught up. It's an unusual approach, but results in faster and higher quality decisions than any other method we've tried.
  • jakubp 7y ago
    Interesting. May I ask -- what are the written comments responding to? A question? A problem statement? Is it a full forum-style thread/discussion (with message-response-response...response) or is it a 1-shot style comment from anyone who had something to say before a meeting?
• ubermonkey 7y ago
  Speaking as a guy with a reasonably successful 30 year career: This is mostly not great advice. - Formatting is useful, and should be used as needed, especially headings and, as indicated, color. Don't become a plaintext zealot. It's not a good hill to die on. - Emails, like all communication, should be as short as possible -- but no shorter. Brevity itself is not a useful thing. - The 2nd bullet is, about the request as a distinct paragraph, is good. A proper email that requests action should make that requested action VERY clear, along with expectations and ideally a timeline. - Contrary to this assertion, email is actually an EXCELLENT forum for discussion in the right context. This is because email is easy to archive, and leaves a trail of the discussion. It's not the ONLY venue, but it's very useful, and in my career has been commonly used as such.
  • jakubp 7y ago
    Any written medium is a bad forum for discussion because it completely lacks the wide emotional bandwidth. If the topic is in any way subtle, risky, controversial, etc. you will get more conflict, misunderstanding, etc. in writing than in person, and fallout will be much harder to get away from. That has been the experience of me and many managers I worked with in IT over the years. I would be shocked if you could get anywhere near the results of in-person conversations with written comms. That should only be possible if you are incredibly aligned with everyone in your org (how likely is that?) or you aren't really discussing anything openly (feigned discussions).
    • ubermonkey 7y ago
      All I can tell you is what I've seen as an internal resource, internal manager, consultant, and external vendor over 30 years. It can and does work. It's not a replacement for meetings (there's no one-size-fits-all in communication), but it is super useful and super effective if used correctly. I'm sorry your job has convinced you otherwise.
      • jakubp 7y ago
        What's the median age of people you work with in that mode? (my guess above 35)
• Communitivity 7y ago
  This. Also, bold is shouting, in some circles. My 'go to' example, when explaining the power of brevity to others, is Hemingway's reputed resignation to his publisher. Vulgar, but a study in brevity: "Upshove Job Asswards". My second example is also Hemingway, this time from a wager to write a story in 6 words. Hemingway won the wager: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_worn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_wo...
  • stronglikedan 7y ago
    I've never heard about bold being shouting. Where is that? IME, all-caps is shouting and bold is merely a type of delineation.
    • kd5bjo 7y ago
      Bold is the single-color equivalent of highlighting. The eye will be drawn to and read boldface words before starting to read the main text, which is why italics are recommended for simple emphasis— from a distance they don’t draw as much attention, but still signal increased importance to the reader.
      • stronglikedan 7y ago
        That's the way I've always understood it too. Italics for light delineation, and bold for important delineation. I've just never heard of bold as yelling, and am interested to know which cultures consider that to be so.
• dugluak 7y ago
  Back when there were no apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams etc Email was probably the only platform for everyday conversations within an organization. But now you hardly need email for day to day trivial conversations within a group. Of course you need Email for a formal organization-wide communication and for all external communications for which you need to put some effort in composition and formatting.
• quakenul 7y ago
  If you want to compose even better emails, learn how to be good with formatting. The linked article makes a fine case of how to. Just like paragraphs (which are just another form of formatting) using indentations, list items, font weights and capitalization correctly will help you structure any text and get your point across more easily. It's important to keep in mind that email is quite literally the only domain, where this is even a topic of discussion, solely due to legacy reasons. I do like not having font color and h2 tags abused, but the key to that is email literacy, not taking away formatting options, that are helpful in making the medium work better for humans.
• gnulynnux 7y ago
  I have to disagree here -- emails are extremely useful for two reasons: 1. It leaves a paper trail (good for accountability), 2. In the case of forgetting a detail or ambiguity, you can look back into the email. I myself struggle with parsing and retaining spoken language, so I make sure to send email confirmations for specific tasks.
• highhedgehog 7y ago
  > The only reason to do that is if you can't get the other party on the phone/in person (which is almost never the case). Well, for me it's mostly to keep people accountable. If you have written down in an email that the deadline is for day X, there is no way someone could say "well, you didn't tell me"
• collyw 7y ago
  I think your comment depends entirely upon your default style of writing. For me its usually the opposite - I need to pad out my emails and clarify what I mean when I say certain things. If I am working on a problem I have lots of concept in my head, and its my initial instinct to just write what I am thinking. On reading through the email a second time, I realize that I need to clarify what I mean by certain words / phrases as the reader hasn't been working on the same thing as me for the last few hours / days so their context will be very different from mine.
• leonroy 7y ago
  Reminds me of that quote: ’I’m sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.’
• tristor 7y ago
  I see you've had a lot of comments disagreeing with your assertion that email is a bad way to have a discussion. I think I understand your point, and I too feel that my discussions are most effective in-person, followed by video chat, followed by phone, and finally in last place written simply due to the varying absence of body language and voice tone. That said, I must disagree within the business context simply for the following reasons, all of which effect me daily in my career: 1. The Internet is global, the world is global, not everyone is a native English speaker and it is necessary to be very clear, and give sufficient time for understanding. Written communication facilitates this by being asynchronous and providing a pathway for transliteration. In my current role I interface with people across more than 60 countries to get large, complex, technology and engineering tasks completed. Email (and to a lesser degree Slack) is essential to this. 2. I work remotely, as do many of my peers, this makes a face to face conversation basically impossible. As a rule, an office culture of having face to face conversations as a preference subtlety devalues the contributions of remote workers and creates a separate political hierarchy within the organization based on higher rapport from face-to-face conversations and the availability of the "hallway track". By building a culture of written, asynchronous communication, we ensure that /all/ employees are on equal footing across the company both politically and materially. 3. My technical projects are of sufficiently high complexity and need a very high level of shared understanding, and that complexity is difficult to communicate with accuracy and precision in spoken word, as it often needs illustrative images accompanying an explanation. Rich text and images together are far more effective at communicating this complexity than speaking to someone. Better yet, is often a demo done via screen sharing or screen sharing for pair programming work. 4. Everyone is busy and has their own personal biases and priorities, as applied to the workplace. To ensure everyone is moving in generally the same direction and aligned to the company goals and team goals, it's important to have accountability. Providing information in a written form which is traceable (email) helps drive accountability and provides everybody involved a point of reference to help them stay on task. 5. An email inbox can act as a rough to-do list / priority queue, and face-to-face conversations act as interrupts on that queue. While you might be "more effective" at getting the things you care about done by talking to people face-to-face, you're doing so at the expense of other things they could be spending their time on which may be higher in the priority queue for the organization. What is most important to you personally within work context may not be the most important thing to the company. Forcing a face to face conversation is taking advantage of the rules of etiquette to manipulate the priority queue. Just a few things to take into account. I think every work environment is different, and it is also easy for us to be biased into a belief that the most effective thing for ourselves is the most effective thing for the organization. This isn't necessarily the case. Often an organization gains net efficiency by using less efficient processes at an individual level which scale more effectively and have inherent checks and balances for accountability, and email is one such case. There is a reason why email is so prolific, basically irreplaceable, and hasn't really been dethroned since it become commonplace.