How did I improve my ‘Business Email’ writing skills

I realized I need to write to express and not write to impress

I definitely felt the impact beyond work emails; I not only improved my business email writing skills but also observed that I became better with scanning and sanity checks which possibly I was not used to doing prior to adopting this strategy. Overall, I could feel the positive change in my communication skills, especially the writing skills.

Note: This is different from written story telling which is something I am working on. Gradually, I should improve and should be able to keep my readers engaged without them losing interest midway. It’s a craftsmanship that needs constant honing and skill upgrades; chances are, it will always be a work in progress.

SO, here goes the process of optimized writing:

STEP 1: Know Your Audience or simply know your reader

To begin with, just scan your audience. This involves ‘audience analysis’ of the recipients, we have to give them what they need to know. An assumption with crisp email writing strategy that I built for myself is to chalk out the ‘good to haves’. Here, I am assuming my readers will already be educated or aware of the fillers, hence I need not reiterate them in all my communications.

A good way to do this analysis is to visualize the recipient’s responses and expressions while he or she is reading your email.

Now, why Step 1 is needed, you may ask? A logical explanation could be ‘the purpose of writing the email at the first place’. As senders, we should know the purpose of reaching out to the audiences on an official channel of communication. We might need to make a few educated guesses as well, but trust me, it helps.

STEP 2: Plan Ahead

To start with, I needed to learn the gaps in my current style. I learnt that I needed to split my time in planning and writing where the golden ratio for me is 60% planning and 40% writing the content.

Now, the basic question to tackle here is easy, how much time do I have for writing this email? Once, I have a clarity of this number, I do the math backwards so that I am planning ahead.

Because of the above clarity, I am now able to clearly distinguish between my agenda (or purpose) and recipient’s agenda (what do they need to know in order to take relevant action) of writing the email.

With the above thoughts in mind appears a first draft of the email followed up by a clean up process.

STEP 3: Use Plain Language

It’s kind of surprising that business writing has changed year on year and I kind of never felt it till I upgraded myself. The learning is, write to express and not to impress. Simple is the new global, following is what I have started to use to make my business communication very simple for consumption for my recipients:

1. Using shortest words I can find
2. Saying things only once
3. Avoiding redundancy
4. Being as specific as I can be
5. Avoiding use of too many describing words or modifiers
6. Using examples

STEP 4: Structure Emails Optimally

This is important because while you have done your best in writing the email, recipients will still not read it word by word, instead they will scan it for relevant information. Hence, all the more important to structure your email in the most optimal fashion. Also, an unstructured email can be a big reason either for the email to be read, ignored, or deleted. A good way to optimize structure can be as follows:

1. Start with the end, most important point first
2. Group like items together
3. Use generous white space
4. Write short paragraphs
5. Create short sentences
6. Use bolding and bullets

STEP 5: Proof Reading

This is the final step before you send the email to your audience. An error only will make you appear careless or clueless

1. Take time to proof read no matter how short you are running on time
2. Change color and font size of the draft to trick your brain into believing you are reading someone else’s draft

STEP 6: Crafting Subject Lines

Possibly the selling point of the email content. To ensure the email is read, we can:

1. Be specific and avoid generic subject lines
2. Should not be too lengthy or way too short, somewhere around 7–8 words
3. Include relevant information in the subject line to make it more convincing for the reader to open the email
4. Use colon (:) and dash (-) to separate critical from non-essential information

The above have helped me greatly to gradually move to an optimized way of writing my business emails. It took me sometime and conscious practice to adjust to the change, but, in the end, it was all worth it.

Hope it helps you as well.

Happy reading :)

PS: The credit of this content goes to Tiffany Markman. I am grateful for her very easy and helpful content on skillshare.com, stay blessed Tiffany.