iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

I’ve been told that I can write a good E-mail – or at least one that can be undertstood. I’ve been asked for advice but generally I defer to those who got a book deal out of their’s. Ben Goodger, lead developer of Firefox (no book deal though), recently posted some advice:

..It’s great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it’s even better when they’re written for busy people. Here are some examples:

• Making important points up front
• Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them
• Writing clearly and succinctly
• No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
• Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
• Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear

I would add:

• Avoid pronouns. If your E-Mail is about something technical your reader will soon lose track of what ‘it’ you are talking about. It also helps with scanning.
• Try to model your sentence and paragraph structure on that of The Toronto Sun, etc.
• Put thought into the E-Mail subject, and if the original in a reply/forward exchange is poor, change it.
• Watch out for those homonyms and the spell checker. You want to be sure your message can be red.

And last, but not least (but maybe the least practised): Read back your own E-Mail (or blog posting) to yourself before you send it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 15:55 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.