Write an Email People Will Actually Read
Or at Least Gather the Appropriate Information From
Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life, where we are celebrating a very shelfie anniversary over the weekend as Shelf Life launched with its first full-length article on September 10, 2020. That was three years ago this weekend: This is a level of math even I can do. If you have never done something unnecessary on a voluntary basis for three years straight I highly recommend it. It builds character. I have a lot more character now than when I started. It’s either accumulating with age or I’m building it. One or the other.
Today’s Shelf Life is on a topic recently requested by a friend after they read August’s Retention and Redundancy, which was about repeating something enough and in the right ways to ensure the audience retains what you need them to retain. My friend said (I am paraphrasing): “I need to apply this trick to work emails because my colleagues never seem to retain the information I give them.” And I thought: There could be a Shelf Life for this. I have a very particular formula for writing business emails and to be quite honest I’m proud of it.
Therefore, today’s Shelf Life is for those whose colleagues don’t read or retain your work emails. How to craft business emails for the greatest possible uptake.
Now: Why am I qualified to write this? Other than I think I’m qualified to speak authoritatively on pretty much every subject I’m interested in? In my career, I send a lot of messages that deliver instructions and assign action items with deadlines. A lot of these emails are, further, sent to people over whom I have no authority and to whom I am not a priority. Even further complicating matters is that many of my emails are sent to authors, and authors can’t read.
I’m just kidding! Obviously authors can read. Nobody better take that personally. “Authors can’t read” is a perennial favorite joke in publishing because we send authors instructions all the livelong day and authors typically follow about 70 percent of those instructions. This is not because authors can’t read or that their reading comprehension is poor. It’s because authors are very busy. Most authors are not full-time authors who write for a living. Most authors and especially authors of nonfiction have day jobs and write in their area of expertise on top of that.
So they’re busy, they’re juggling a lot of things, they might not have time to read my email closely and thoroughly. They definitely don’t have time to read it twice. And then, at times, I’m writing to multiple authors or editors (for instance, coauthors on a single project) and I need each of those individuals to get the correct information for themself plus any information I need the whole group to absorb. Anyway, it’s an art and a science. Which I impart here today.
Address It to the Right People
First, don’t put people on the “to” line of your email who don’t need to be on your email. For that matter, don’t carbon copy (CC) people who don’t need it, either. This teaches people that you send emails they sometimes don’t need to read. This can lead to them skimming or skipping your emails altogether when they’re busy.
Plus, the more people on your “to” line the fewer people may actually read; some recipients will assume, if there are many other recipients, that someone else will deal with the email.
Second, only include people on the “to” line of your email who have action items or who directly require the information in your email for their specific use. Don’t include people on the “to” line if they are receiving the email as an FYI, for their records, or just to keep them “in the loop.” Put those people on the CC line.
Don’t use blind carbon copy (BCC) to quietly give information to someone without the other recipients knowing. Just never do this. After you have sent the email, find it in your sent mail and forward it to the person. BCCing is often a recipe for disaster. If you have never had a BCCd party reply to all and reveal your subterfuge to everyone, then consider yourself lucky and learn from my fails.
Acceptable uses of BCC include BCCing yourself to have a copy of the email for your records (but why not just use CC?) or sending a message to yourself with a long distribution list in the BCC field to avoid sharing all the recipients’ contact details with each other. BCCing someone’s boss is never a good look. Just forward the email later and talk to the boss directly if you need to have a conversation.
Organize the Subject Line
I’m going to talk a good bit about news-style writing in this Shelf Life, also known as the inverted pyramid format. More about that in a bit but the principle to keep in mind is that people will start reading from top to bottom and people may peel off at any moment (that is, stop reading and move on to something else). In order to make sure the right people read as much of your message as possible, you need an organized, descriptive, and detailed subject line. Some people will only read the subject line. Some people will decide whether to read further based on the subject line. The subject line is to your email as the headline is to a newspaper article. Make it count.
The subject line should be brief and descriptive and include the main reason for the email. Let’s say I’m sending a proof out for an author to review, mark up with changes or approve as-is, and return to me by a deadline. Consider some subject lines I might use.
Proofs for review
First, proofs of what? Bold of me to assume this author only has one publication in work right now and I’m it.
Proof of Your Journal of Shelf Sciences Article for Review
Better. Now the author can see at a glance that there is a proof for them to review and it is for their article in the Journal of Shelf Sciences. If they also have other publications they’re juggling, for instance a shelf sciences 101 textbook and an article in Journal of Interdisciplinary Shelf Studies, they’ll know which publication this is for.
Due 9/12: Proof Review for Journal of Shelf Sciences
Better still. This tells the author without even opening the message that they have a proof to review for Journal of Shelf Sciences and it’s due on Tuesday. If this author has a day job they’re attending to, they don’t have to dig through the email to find out if they can leave this for the weekend or if they need to jump on it right now. If the due date were this Friday, the subject line would also tell them “hey you can’t wait till the weekend to open this because it’s due back Friday.”
I’m sending an email that includes an action item (review the proofs), a deadline for that action item, and instructions on how to do the action item. The third subject line captures both the action item and the deadline for it, without being a novel-length unto itself. Try to cram as much of the important info into the subject line without going over 10 words.
The Inverted Pyramid
As writers, we may naturally tend toward a narrative format of conveying information. We may want to start by introducing ourselves and saying why we’re writing today, and then giving some background on the situation, and then progressing to the action items.
Journalists follow a very different format for news articles: They lead with the most crucial and timely facts, then add details and background later in the article. This is because not all readers want or need all that background info. Some just want the critical information and then to move on to the next article. The decision whether to read on to the background information is made by the reader based on how interested they were in the crucial and timely details in the lede (or how important it is to them).
Another way to think of it, as I said above, is that readers will peel off (stop reading) when they feel they’ve absorbed enough information—all the information they need, all the information they want, or all the information they think is important to them. If there’s more information further down that’s important to them, they may miss it if they peeled off already. This is why, in a business email, you want to follow a news style.
The subject line, as I said above, is your headline.
The first paragraph of your email is the lede. In a news article, this is the opening paragraph that conveys all the important information of the news story clearly and concisely, without going into additional detail.
Take a look at this Associated Press article from today on Japan’s rocket launch. The lede reads:
Japan launched a rocket Thursday carrying an X-ray telescope that will explore the origins of the universe as well as a small lunar lander.
I don’t love how this sentence is written because it implies the X-ray telescope will explore the lunar lander but nevermind, I’m not finding another example. This lede tells you all the important facts. What happened? (Rocket launch.) Who? (Japan.) When? (Thursday.) Why? (Explore the origins of the universe and the small lunar lander.)
The article then goes on, in subsequent paragraphs, to give additional details.
Whatever email you’re writing, I recommend starting with a lede similar to a news article. For instance, my proof email might begin like this:
Attached is the proof of your Journal of Shelf Sciences article for your review. Instructions on how to markup and return the proof are also attached. Please mark up your proof with any corrections and return it, or let us know your article is approved without corrections, by Tuesday, September 12.
Everything the author absolutely needs to know is in that paragraph. If they stop reading right there, that’s fine. I have a lot more details to add in the subsequent paragraphs about what kind of changes can and cannot be made, where to find our style manual, who to contact with questions, and how to order article reprints—but the author can go looking for that information if they have questions. The important thing is their action item and deadline—and it’s right there in their face.
Bullet Time
Now that I’ve given them the lede, is it time to dive right into the additional information? No—now it’s bullet time. Bullet lists are amazing for getting people’s attention. If you follow your lede with a few bullet items, you’re very likely to keep most of your readers through at least the lede and the bullet list. You increase the quantity of words you can convey that people are likely to read before they peel off. You can use the bullet items to share additional important information beyond what’s in the lede or reiterate the most important things, or both.
For instance, in my message to the author I might follow my lede with this:
Open your proof using Adobe Acrobat and save a copy of the file to work on. Use the comment function rather than the edit function to ensure we receive your corrections.
If your proof does not require corrections, you must reply to this message to let us know the proof is approved without changes. We cannot proceed with publication until we have your corrections or approval.
Articles typically publish 1 to 2 weeks after receipt of your corrections.
I’ve used three bullets here to head off the most common questions I get at the proof stage as well as the most common mistake authors make. I know they’re going to want to know when the article will publish, and I know they may not realize they need to respond even if they have no corrections. Putting the solution to these items right in the bullet list where they’re highly likely to be read saves me effort in the long run.
Format Frenzy
Now that you’ve composed the parts that convey the most critical info and are most likely to be read, you can go on to the additional details that you hope the recipient will read. To maximize the uptake, you can enlist a few formatting tricks to make the message more palatable.
First, keep in mind that the more text you write, the less likely it is that the reader will get all the way through it. Every business email recipient has a breaking point where they look at an email and say “this is too long, I can’t deal with this right now” and they flag it to deal with later. Sometimes later is never. To that end, don’t include information nobody needs. Limit yourself to what’s important.
Second, use the paragraph break liberally. Long paragraphs with no white space turn readers off and are more likely to trigger that “I can’t deal with this right now” reaction.
Next, use subheadings. For instance, if I want to give additional details on the changes that can and can’t be made, basics of the style manual, the publication timeline, and ordering reprints, I can create those four headings in my email so the reader can quickly see what all those extra paragraphs cover. If I launch into an explanation of appropriate and inappropriate changes to make at proofs and the author already knows or doesn’t care and they stop reading, they won’t even know there’s information about ordering reprints below. Then I get an email like, “Hey how do I order reprints?” and I have to be that jerk that responds, “Well if you look at my last email….” Nobody wants to be that jerk. Just put in subheads if you have a lot of things to cover.
Finish with a summary that reiterates the important information. If somebody did read the entire email with all the extra details and information, they might have forgotten some of the important stuff from the start. Right? It’s been 840 words since we talked about the AP article—do you remember what was on the rocket Japan launched Thursday? Wrap up with a quick summation:
Thanks for your attention to your proofs. I look forward to receiving your corrections, or your approval of the uncorrected article, by September 12.
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