Email templates

One of the most frequent things I'm asked to do for friends is to help them proofread their emails. Additionally, some students have recently asked me for templates for things such as emails requesting recommendations from professors, the GRE/GMAT analytical writing section, or the Kira interview writing assessment.

There's no magic template for effective communication. The best I can do is offer some principles, which I'll do today.

This will be rather short, because I covered most of the principles in another post. However, I realized that aside from knowing your audience, being polite, and leading with the important information, there are a couple of other points - especially when it comes to emails.

What's your objective?

Sometimes, I encounter emails where it's unclear what the sender actually wants. This is one of the biggest mistakes we can make in communication. Normally, we're writing to someone for a very specific reason. Maybe we want to follow up with a phone call or coffee chat; maybe we want to say thank you and leave the door open for a future conversation; or maybe we want additional details that haven't been made clear yet; and so on.

The entire email should be written with your objective at the forefront of your mind. It should factor into your decision of what to include in the email subject. It should dictate how long your email should be. And it may even influence how much information you want to include in the email.

Length

Many emails are too long. An open secret is that most people simply skim over most long emails, paying attention only to the beginning, the end, and possibly some headings, links and/or numbers in the middle.

Aside from official corporate communications meant to convey a lot of information, I have yet to witness any emails that absolutely needed to be over 500 words.

Keep it short. Aim to accomplish just one objective with each email. It's hard enough to get people to open emails; succeeding with one objective would already be an amazing result. Don't make it more complicated than it has to be!