#i also wrote this with grammarly so its grammatically correct
Text
there are no happy people.
One of the main themes of Alice’s books is that there are no happy people. In Solitaire, Tori says it and thinks it throughout the book, and Alice continues with that theme throughout all of their books. In solitaire, there are no happy people. Micheal isn’t happy, Charlie isn’t happy, Lucas isn’t happy, Becky isn’t happy, Tori isn’t happy. There are no happy people. Radio silence, there are no happy people. Aled isn't happy, Frances isn't happy, Dan isn't happy, Carys isn't happy. There are no happy people. Loveless, there are no happy people. Pip isn't happy, Rooney isn't happy, Sunil isn't happy, Jason isn’t happy, Georgia isn’t happy. There are no happy people. In I was born for this, there are no happy people. Rowan isn't happy, Juliet isn't happy, Angel isn't happy, Lister isn't happy, Jimmy isn't happy. There are no happy people. Heartstopper, there are no happy people. Nick isn't happy, Tao isn't happy, Elle isn't happy, Tara isn't happy, Darcy isn't happy, Charlie isn’t happy. There are no happy people. In every one of Alice’s novels, she starts with a character who isn't happy and knows it, who isn't happy and doesn’t know what to do about it or how to help it. And then throughout the novels, the character learns more about the people around them and realizes that, there are no happy people. Everyone they thought was happy and had perfect lives, doesn’t. And then towards the end of the novel, the character feels less alone in their sadness because they realize they are not the only one. There are no happy people, and that’s what can make the not-happy people happy again.
#im obsessed and cant sleep and on the verge of a mental breakdown#what do you expect#i also wrote this with grammarly so its grammatically correct#an ode to alice oseman#i love you so much#alice oseman#osemanverse#radio silence#i was born for this#loveless#heartstopper#solitaire
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How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
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How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
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4 tools and technical tips to improve your writing
4 tools and technical tips to improve your writing
https://theministerofcapitalism.com/blog/4-tools-and-technical-tips-to-improve-your-writing/
Do not care whether you’re writing a company-wide note, whether you’re having trouble doing homework, or if you’re working on your first novel. Writing is never easy. Work is needed. If you’re here, you know it. Luckily, there are some hacks to improve the writing (or post-writing) process.
I’ve spent much of the last decade as a freelance writer. In doing so, I had to come up with tricks and ways to use technology to help me along the way. This includes things like learning how to edit myself better to find out who has shared my published work later. It may not be easy to write, but it doesn’t have to be impossible either.
Use technology to detect typos and errors
Did you know that spellchecking was once a benchmark used to measure how fast a computer could run? Its usefulness was innovative. Now, the red lines group each text box and computational overload is a distant memory. Technical tools for writing abound. If you’re writing to Google Docs, you know the help they can give you. Its grammatical and spelling correction can also burn you.
To avoid mistakes, do not rely on a single writing tool. Instead, combine several to better edit yourself in a first or second pass. As good as Google Docs is to find contradictory times or trends of proper names, I have also seen many obvious mistakes lost.
In the same way, Grammatically is an amazing writing assistant that can have your back on web forms or almost anywhere you type.
The combination of several tools helps reduce errors. It’s like passing the writing through strainers of different sizes. This takes a lot of time for each writing task, but it can be worth it for the important ones.
Beyond Google Docs or Grammarly, Hemingway application is an orderly resource that classifies a piece of text and points out the passive voice, hard-to-read sentences, and other ways you could write be improved improve.
Improve your writing on your own
Editing your own writing is a superpower. Few people are born with the skill. But it also can’t be managed if a writer stops when every editor isn’t available. I try to get my wife to read my writings when I can, but often the timing is not practical. So a few years ago I started using speech technology to help me review and improve my own writing. Listening to the words out loud, in a different voice, changes the game.
There are many ways to do this. The capability is native to iOS, macOS and Windows. If you highlight a selection of text on an iPhone, one of the options on the right is “Speak.” It will start reading the selected text. On a Mac, the option is below the Edit, Speak menu item. This feature is Narrator in Windows. To turn it on, go to Settings, Ease of Access, and then Narrator.
Beyond catching skipped words, I use text to voice to discover lack of tension or informational holes. Listening instead of watching the writing is a great way to find what is missing. Listening makes it easier to be more objective with your own work. In the worst case, read your work aloud to yourself: completely aloud, not just breaking down your draft. Listening to the phrases aloud will help you pick up places where you inadvertently wrote a common phrase or where you might have used different words.
Keep track of your writing online
If you write to post it somewhere, be sure to keep track of your work after it increases. Whether it’s a post on a company’s blog, marketing material, personal essay, fiction story, or reported journalism, seeing how it’s shared allows a writer to get a complete picture of the impact of their words.
Social impact tracking can quickly lead you to a world of marketing and SEO tools. It’s probably best to avoid them, unless it’s your field, or if you’re responsible for the ones you work with. Instead, give it a try Muckrack service for URL tracking and you will see its influence among journalists, if you want to follow up. You can also use a service like CrowdTangle to see how your work is shared on social media. Its functionality has varied over the years, but it provides information on how to share links on Facebook. You can also try tools like Authors, which also keeps track of how your work is shared on the web and through social media, and collects everything into a shareable profile so you can back it up.
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How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
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How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
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How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient.
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas.
from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/
via IFTTT
0 notes
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