{"id":246,"date":"2006-03-27T15:55:14","date_gmt":"2006-03-27T20:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattclare.ca\/wordpress\/2006\/03\/27\/writing-an-e-mail-to-be-read\/"},"modified":"2006-03-27T15:55:14","modified_gmt":"2006-03-27T20:55:14","slug":"writing-an-e-mail-to-be-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/2006\/03\/27\/writing-an-e-mail-to-be-read\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing an E-Mail to be read"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been told that I can write a good E-mail &#8211; or at least one that can be undertstood.  I&#8217;ve been asked for advice but generally I defer to those who got a book deal out of their&#8217;s.  <a href=\"http:\/\/weblogs.mozillazine.org\/ben\/archives\/009964.html\">Ben Goodger, lead developer of Firefox (no book deal though), recently posted some advice<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>..It&#8217;s great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it&#8217;s even better when they&#8217;re written for busy people. Here are some examples:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<ul><\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Making important points up front<\/li>\n<li>Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them<\/li>\n<li>Writing clearly and succinctly<\/li>\n<li>No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.<\/li>\n<li>Preferring bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.<\/li>\n<li>Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I would add:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Avoid pronouns. If your E-Mail is about something technical your reader will soon lose track of what &#8216;it&#8217; you are talking about.  It also helps with scanning.<\/li>\n<li>Try to model your sentence and paragraph structure on that of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.torontosun.com\/\">The Toronto Sun<\/a>, etc.<\/li>\n<li>Put thought into the E-Mail subject, and if the original in a reply\/forward exchange is poor, change it.<\/li>\n<li>Watch out for those homonyms and the spell checker. You want to be sure your message can be red.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been told that I can write a good E-mail &#8211; or at least one that can be undertstood. I&#8217;ve been asked for advice but generally I defer to those who got a book deal out of their&#8217;s. Ben Goodger, lead developer of Firefox (no book deal though), recently posted some advice: ..It&#8217;s great when&hellip; <a class=\"continue\" href=\"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/2006\/03\/27\/writing-an-e-mail-to-be-read\/\">Continue Reading<span> Writing an E-Mail to be read<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattclare.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}