If you are following the advice provided in the earlier lessons, you should already be writing much clearer, more effective e-mails. These rules have to be remembered, however, and you need to remind yourself constantly. In 1946, George Orwell wrote Politics and the English Language, in which he proposed his rules for effective writing.

So far, we know what we want to write, and who we want to write to. Now, we have to actually write it. For this, the most important rule is “KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid!”

Before, we looked at why we’re writing, and who we are writing to. Now, it’s time to think about what we’re writing about.
As I said before, your e-mail should be easy to understand, with one idea in the e-mail, with a corresponding subject header. There is no reason why the body of the e-mail should not also be easy to understand!

In the previous lesson, we looked at why you are writing the e-mail. Now, let’s think about who we are writing to.

How many times have you received an e-mail and wondered “Why am I  getting this?” Quite often, in an organisation, e-mails are sent back and forth to supervisors, subordinates, colleagues, clients and specialists, with many people included in the addressees, and more people copied in the cc line. I have seen e-mails dealing with ordinary day-to-day subjects addressed to five or ten people, with another 20 people copied in. How is anybody supposed to guess who does what?

We don’t really read e-mail for content, we just want to know what we have to do and get rid of it as quickly as possible. When someone asks us a  question in an e-mail, the quickest way to deal with it is to just copy and paste the ready answer into the body of the mail and press ‘send’. Perhaps we just write ‘FYI’ and send it to our colleague, or just write the words “Please advise” and then forward it to a different department. But this doesn’t always help the people we’re writing to, and if we need them to reply, we want to help them reply as quickly and as effectively as possible.

We do this by making sure that the Subject Line is always relevant!