A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email:
Context
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood ducky@netcom.com
In a conversation, there is some minimum of shared context. You might
be in the same physical location, and even on the phone you have,
at minimum, commonality of time. If you are generating a document for paper,
usually
there will be some context: it is in the proceedings of a conference,
written on a birthday card, handed in to your Econ 101 professor with a batch
of other Econ 101 term papers, or something similar.
With email, you can't assume anything about your correspondent's
location, time, frame of mind, mood, health, marital status, affluence, age,
or gender. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very
careful about giving your reader some context.
Instead of sending email that says:
yes
Say:
> Are you going to have the left-handed thromblemeister specs
> done by Thursday?
yes
The ">" here is a relatively standard convention for quoting someone
else's words.
Imagine getting a response on Monday to some email that you think
maybe you sent on Friday:
I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
the other one before they make up their minds.
(Huh???)
You'd probably be much happier with:
> I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassembly
> ready; as soon as I get a decision on the
> thromblemeister selection, I'll be ready to go.
> Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether
> they are ready to go with the left-handed thrombo or
> do they want to wait and check out the right-handed
> one first?
I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
the other one before they make up their minds.
This is substantially better, but now errs on the side of too much context.
You shouldn't have to wade through gobs of extraneous
stuff to get to the meat of the message.
You should include just enough to provide a context for the message and no more.
Peter Kimble, my high school CS teacher, now gives his students the
rule of thumb that half of the lines in an email should be your own.
(If you must include the
whole message that you are replying to, include it after your
response.)
You would probably be even more pleased with:
> Have you talked to the thermo guys
I talked to the thermo group on Wednesday, and they
think the left-handed thromblemeister will probably
work, but they want to evaluate the right-handed unit
before they make up their minds.
Note that here there is the right amount of context, and the answer is
very clear and specific. A good rule of thumb is to look very carefully
at all pronouns in your first three sentences. If they don't refer to
something explicitly stated in the email, change them to something
concrete.
If the sentence is in the middle of a paragraph, or wraps around
lines, go ahead and remove everything but the part that you were
really interested in, inserting "[...]" if you have to take something
out in the middle. If you need to substitute a value for a pronoun,
go ahead but put the value in square brackets:
> [The thermo guys] want to evaluate the
> right-handed unit
Fine. The right-handed unit should be here
by Thursday; I'll phone them the minute it hits
my desk.
Ducky
Last Modified
January 7, 2005 This document is in the public domain. You may copy it, modify it,
shred it, mail it to your neighbor, put it on a telephone pole, tack
it up on a bathroom wall, or anything else that you feel like doing with
it. Some credit would be nice but is not necessary.
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