David Silverman is succinct and to the point in his blog about writing good emails, Four Tips For Writing Better Emails
1 Call to action
2 Say it upfront
3 Assume nothing
4 Do the thinking
RELEVANT LINK
Four Tips For Writing Better Emails
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6 comments:
Which is why I dislike such emails, and prefer the telephone and face to face for business.
One can read all or nothing about the personality of an email's author, mostly the latter these days as everything apparently has to be reduced to the one liner.
If it happens to be more than a nanosecond to read, those replying apparently lose grip of their attention span, and reply selectively, which inevitably leads to follow up emails. Hence we then have resort to sending a one liner email for each and every subject, leading to overloaded in-boxes.
Shorter emails, unless conveying a short message, lull the author into a false sense of security, and are tantamount to multi-tasking, in that they are generally less effective, and often lead to confusion.
Whilst I agree that a good structure ought to be adhered to, for the rest, I believe we are simply going the way of Blackberry and Twitter "protocol;" another generation "why?" invention that serves little purpose, and that assists people in reducing their social skills, thus turning society into automatons.
That I should look to Gen Y or the tasseled loafered MBA's of Blackberry Inc for guidance on protocol is quite absurd as, in my experience, such people, astoundingly, have little or no knowledge of manners and etiquette, which unbeknown to them, is an invaluable tool in high value business.
Emails are nasty these days. The way people write them is as if they don't even have time to breathe. The lost art of communication is sad, along with the lost art of business. Business was always about people connecting properly and long term relationships. Since we do things the way the americans and chinese do today - all that is gone. All the more to be had that still know how to relate properly and spend the time doing it. Balls to the crass culture of the yanks.
SW
And so we mention twitter - is that a Robert Craven thing or not?
TW
(not related to TWitter!)
Robert
You do not have a twitter account. More Facebook nonsense?
TW
And so we mention twitter - is that a Robert Craven thing or not?
TW
(not related to TWitter!)
Which is why I dislike such emails, and prefer the telephone and face to face for business.
One can read all or nothing about the personality of an email's author, mostly the latter these days as everything apparently has to be reduced to the one liner.
If it happens to be more than a nanosecond to read, those replying apparently lose grip of their attention span, and reply selectively, which inevitably leads to follow up emails. Hence we then have resort to sending a one liner email for each and every subject, leading to overloaded in-boxes.
Shorter emails, unless conveying a short message, lull the author into a false sense of security, and are tantamount to multi-tasking, in that they are generally less effective, and often lead to confusion.
Whilst I agree that a good structure ought to be adhered to, for the rest, I believe we are simply going the way of Blackberry and Twitter "protocol;" another generation "why?" invention that serves little purpose, and that assists people in reducing their social skills, thus turning society into automatons.
That I should look to Gen Y or the tasseled loafered MBA's of Blackberry Inc for guidance on protocol is quite absurd as, in my experience, such people, astoundingly, have little or no knowledge of manners and etiquette, which unbeknown to them, is an invaluable tool in high value business.
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