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Comment by tosser0001 | Hacker News Reader

> * If there's a question for the person to answer, make sure it is the very last sentence in the email.

Oddly enough I do the exact opposite: Within reason, I try to make the question I want answered the very first sentence.

I hate expository emails. Just tell me what you’re looking for. If I need more detail I would hope the follow on text would provide it.

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I use a framework I learned while taking a course on legal argumentation back in college. Turns out it works fairly well in longer emails (whenever a paragraph is needed). Write your question/conclusion at the beginning and end. Stick context, evidence, and analysis in the middle in that order.

You could literally use the same sentence first and last if you just really need to get the point across and don't have time to get creative.

Mind sharing the framework?

I believe they just did.

There's also a factor in how modern email clients display messages. Gmail, Apple mail, etc show the first few words of the text alongside/under the subject.

Am I more likely to open an email that says "[subject] Have you heard about how cloud services can reduce..." -or- "[subject] Does that time work for you?"

(Disclaimer: neither, please stop emailing me about your amazing cloud services and how it will save me money.)

Just to clarify, this article was not about sales emails, and the tips I offered above were likewise not about reaching out to people I'd never talked to before. They were about following up with people with whom I'd already had substantive conversations that indicated mutual interest.

I think the strategies — and etiquette — for cold outreach emails are totally different.

I often do both. Very rarely do people read carefully in a business context these days. I design my work emails to be easily skimmed and I often repeat myself in different ways. You can't assume people will understand you, you must seek to be understood. Even after all of that, people will fail to respond to important emails because everyone is just so Fin burnt out these days!

Sounds sensible. That way, I can read the rest of your email through the lens of what's being asked of me. It won't seem like a pile of facts being thrown at me, as you've already established why I should care. Academic papers do something similar.

Taken further, we could put the question in the subject line. The email body can then provide detail and finally re-state the question.

Subject: Ok to manually norble remaining flurbs?

Body: As you know, our flurb-norblement service is out of action until Friday next week, and our un-norbled flurbs are costing us double. Should I go ahead and manually norble our remaining un-norbled flurbs, or just wait until the service comes back on?

(I've omitted the informal 'Hi Alice' prefix, and formal 'Best regards, Bob' suffix, that seem to have become standard intra-office netiquette.)

I googled this approach, but it seems that most articles about writing emails, are just lazy clickbait 'list articles'.

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