Writing Effective E-Mail

This course is to provide guidelines which show us how to be more efficient, clear, and effective.

The subject line should be short and should give a clue to the contents of the message. If you message is time-critical, it is a good idea to add "URGENT" on the subject line. If you need to pose a specific request, it is a good idea to add "REQ:" to the subject line. If offering non-urgent information and no response is required, you could preface the subject line with "FYI". It is not a good idea to use the word "information" in the subject line or body of message.

When responding to a previous email, it is a good idea to quote from that message to give context to your reply. The greater-than or > symbol is the most widely used convention for quoting someone else's email message. It is a good rule to look very carefully at all pronouns in the first three sentences of your reply. If they don't refer to something explicitly stated in the email, change them to something concrete. If you want to quote a sentence from the middle of a paragraph, you can remove everything but the part that you are really interested in. You can paraphrase by using square brackets. You can use "[...]" to indicate you deleted material from the original passage.

Main points from this weeks lesson:
Provide useful subject lines.
Avoid pronouns in the first three lines.
Quote from the previous message.

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