How to Write an Email
blog.dannycastonguay.com
blog.dannycastonguay.com
WHAT YOU ARE SAYING
WHAT YOU NEED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE (RESPONSE OR DECISION OR ACTION ETC)
As time goes on, often I say (to myself) "forget that", and write all the detail that is needed anyway, even in email. But only for audiences that may care about the detail (or otherwise are safe to skip the email altogether).
But who uses email at work anymore, anyway, right? I guess some organizations.
big tech CEOs and major politicians use email almost as if it's an instant messenger: short, informal, to the point.
I guess it kinda bites them in the ass because the way I know this is via email leaks or subpoenas...
But it does mean that people can use whatever clients they like, and they can be across multiple organisations without weirdly expensive plans and administrators bridging instances or what have you.
Always - as long as it makes proper use of paragraphs and doesn't have too many spelling/grammatical errors.
If I ever have to respond to an email asking clarification questions because they wanted to write a concise email, then my time is being wasted.
And it shows. If you are not the boss, you can't just write something and expect the recipient to figure it out.
I live and work in France, and oh boy... It's just cultural. Every email is like a letter to the King. "Would you be so kind enough to consider my humble request that is described hereafter in next three paragraphs". Funny thing: I welcome AI summaries on those.
My other pet peeve: meeting invitations. Half of the meetings in my calendar are called "Point" in French (loosely translated as "Topic"), the other half has no descriptions but the headlines. I tried the "I am not going unless I know why I am invited" thing to no avail - you cannot win this against the entire org.
So, you guess from the list of invitees. Or ask the organizer at lunch. Then go with them to the meeting to discuss the Topic for 15 minutes. Which could have been easily discussed at lunch, but lunch time is reserved to discuss food, not work.
Oh well. I love our cuisine, though. And the culture, and people, everything really. Just not how we write email.
Ha! When I was in grad school, we had a brilliant French student in our team. He did his MS, and decided halfway he hated the US (understandable at the time) and would return to Europe for the PhD.
When he started applying for positions, he would just keep cursing. When I asked what was wrong, he said he'd gotten used to the (more) direct American approach, and was finding it burdensome to write formal, sycophantic emails to people in France.
Please reply by 3 pm today so we can confirm with the client.
in my experience when an action relies on somebody 'coming back' ESPECIALLY if it's a client. (do you want this, or that?)
It's best to tell them what you are going to do, unless they confirm otherwise.
e.g. We will proceed with removing feature Y to meet deadline of Mar 19, unless otherwise directed by 3pm today.
This avoids the limbo situtation where a team can't progress because they don't have clarity on X or Y.
Not always applicable but I find it works a lot of the time.
After sending emails to suppliers, they would often answer the first point in the text but ignore later points. This speaks to the send only 1 thing in an email, but if you have a few questions about something then put them in a numbered list.
I found response quality went way up when i did this, and often the responses were along the lines of :
1. do this 2. yes that's right 3. ok we note that
which i'm sure helps them becuaes the email is easier to read and parse in the first place and easier to write a reply to.
Why the email then? Wouldn’t a record of the decision (not via email , but in some confluence-like space) be enough? If the confirmation is really needed then a default action wouldn’t be possible, ofc
By very direct analogy, I think there's a dictum in the US military to the effect that a bad plan executed quickly can be better than a perfect plan that's executed too late.
ETA: ... and you're potentially speeding the decision/action by giving leadership the opportunity to confirm/redirect on receipt of the email.
I’m going to McDonalds what do you want— a big mac meal sure no problem.
Get there. Oh wait what did he want for a drink? Coke? Coffee? Water?
Send a text what you want to drink?
No answer — what do you do?
Instead text should be saying ‘getting u a coke unless you let me know’
No answer in time, so you just get a coke for your friend and if he doesn’t like it tough.
So in that sense i guess yes its a polite notice. But it points to failures in the process .
You should have known what he wanted to drink before going.
You have or now create a policy that states in cases of unknown drink or default is coke.
If your guys ‘don’t’ know whether they can drop feature X or ship late they have been failed by the level above that should state shipping is priority. Therefore dropping a feature is the only action that they can take.
But in take the other point that you do need some authority . Without it progress will stall, and this becomes management issue again. They didn’t ensure you had the info or resource to do the thing.
Edit to add after thinking about it a bit more, that when dealing with customers a slow customer can stall your whole op if you make waiting on a decision from them. Just tell then what you are doing and it lets you proceed. If they come back later with opposite decision then you just do that as well,typically.
Outputting files to a customer :
Do you want them named like this or like that?
No— tell them how you are naming them and if they dont like it theybwil let you know.
Its about removing decisions from customer as most of the time they dont even know what they want
In that case you can't distinguish wanting a coke from not having read or received the message at all. If you want synchronous communication, maybe you should use a synchronous communication channel.
In one team I did this all the time even though I didn't have the decision power. I did it to force people to respond.
Prior to my adopting this strategy, I'd send an email saying "We need a decision about this by X", and the most common response was ... sorry, there wasn't any! The majority of times people didn't respond, and I was stuck.
So I had to switch to "This is needed by X. I'm going to go ahead with Y, but let me know if you have other ideas."
And I would ensure that Y was a poor solution. I would get really rapid responses saying "Don't do Y! Do Z!"
Even though I've moved to other teams, I often use this technique (except if the team acts in good faith, my solution Y is actually my best attempt at solving it).
How do you ensure people don't think you're not good at your job, if you continually propose poor solutions? Since you're emailing other teams here, they probably(?) don't get to work with you day-to-day to realize you're doing this on purpose.
Also, what's the point of Y being a poor solution? Even if the other team isn't very responsive, can't you always propose your
> best attempt at solving it
such that even if they don't respond, you can implement a decent solution?
Great point. In the beginning, it was fine because I was new and didn't have domain knowledge. As time went by, I had decided I hate the team/job and I need to find a new job anyway.
> Also, what's the point of Y being a poor solution?
In this scenario, I was never in a point of knowing if my good solution was good enough. My best attempt may be something that would get me 80-90% of the way but needed small modifications.
People speed reading my email might not see the nuance and think I already had the correct approach, and wouldn't respond. That risks going forth with a problematic solution. If, however, you say something that is clearly wrong, people are quick to respond.
More concisely, if I go with my best approach, and no one responds, I still don't know if my approach is correct or not. The point of the email is I need their feedback. So I have to set up the situation to virtually guarantee I get their feedback.
(Another approach I would do is list 3 options I was thinking of, and make the default one a poor one - at least this way they know I'm capable of thinking up good solutions but haven't developed judgement yet).
> such that even if they don't respond, you can implement a decent solution?
The goal is to elicit a response. If I say clearly "I need a response", then I'm not going to get it.
Again, do this only with problematic teams. This isn't a guide for normal work. For normally functioning teams, I would recommend going with the best approach and making that the clear default.
Crappy teams lead to crappy strategies.
Incidentally, people are reading too much into this. No one got upset at me for doing this. They knew I was trying to solve a problem. And they knew the bottleneck was themselves.
Writing the email is part of the thinking process for me so by the time I finish there is a single coherent sentence that I can cut-paste to the top with the rationale/evidence/etc organized below it. If the one-liner is enough they can skip the rest (which I needed to write anyway regardless) and if they need more detail they don't have to ask.
Some other practices I've picked up over the years:
Responses should always be inline between relevant quotes rather than the default of hiding the original at the bottom. Remove quotes that don't matter. My favourite responses are a simple "Agreed." after a long quoted paragraph of justification.
In general the email chain should get shorter with each reply otherwise it suggests that the topic is either too complex or insufficiently defined. It also gives some sense that it will eventually end!
Write subject lines that make searching/filtering easy to do later rather than something to catch the recipient's attention.
Same here.
> Responses should always be inline between relevant quotes rather than the default of hiding the original at the bottom.
This is highly polarizing. As you can tell I also like inline replies. I grew up using BBSs and inline replies were common. It seemed so natural. Then Outlook came around and top-posting became the norm.
I have gotten some scathing criticism from higher-ups for inline responses (along with some scant praise). I have been told, repeatedly, that inline responses are confusing.
Personally, I think anybody confused by inline responses (particularly if they're formatted distinctly) probably shouldn't be using email as part of their job because they lack the necessary mental faculties.
(I've given up with my strongly-held beliefs about plain text email. I still send plain text by default but I grudgingly reply with HTML / rich text if an email started that way.)
(I use the same plain text email strategy)
> Good: Action needed today: approve revised offer Decision needed: pricing for Client X Update: contract signed with Acme Risk: launch delayed by one week
Some of these are good, but a lot of it depends on company culture. It sounds like he's barking orders at people, which may be received poorly. Some of it borders on sounding like Kevin in The Office when he tried to eliminate words from his speech to save time.
Well it certainly depends on the recipient, but I will often take some time to make the email personal.
The immediate-response-rate goes down even more if the input being sought is not framed as a question ("I've been trying to figure out how to handle this situation" versus "Which do you think is the better route?").
Of course, some people will still respond regardless, but I've found that in both personal and business emails, keeping an email short and finishing with a question mark is the best way to ensure a rapid response.
https://old.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/4dmufm/how_tech_writ...
Subject: feature X dropped from v4.4
Body: we all know this feature is delayed and will cause the release to slip. Marketing gave us the OK to defer it to 4.5
Subject: [Action, Decision, Update, Risk]: [topic]
[First sentence: the ask or punchline.]
[Two to five lines of facts, with names, numbers, and dates.]
[Recommendation or next step.]
[Owner and deadline.]
Dollars to donuts the next generation of AI models will use this template as is, humans will forget to replace the placeholders and you’ll start getting a ton of emails with some of the placeholders verbatim.
I think you're right.
Or people screw up the placeholder content and call you by the wrong name, wrong job title, wrong company, whatever (off by 1 errors in some columns in their automation sheet?).
It's already happening with outreach messages on LinkedIn. Gets an instant block.
This is especially important in multi-recipient emails, where different people need to address different issues.
And then I reached:
> 10. AI is fine. Generic language is not.
> It is fine to use AI to draft or review an email.
> But edit it until it sounds specific and human.
Ok, maybe we shouldn't take advice from someone, who authoritatively states it is fine to put slop in the email?
Do not use email for long back and forth…
Seriously though thats a different type of communication though? Can you host slack on prem?
Turning off notifications would mean muting people that are more respectful and might have a legitimate reason to disrupt you.
I stopped reading right there. He's plain wrong about much (the majority?) of the world.
works when the recipient is attuned to it. when the recipient is attuned to flowery/over-polite language i've found they can get upset/assume you're being rude/dismissive.