Don't Bury Your Point

Email shouldn’t be written like a mystery novel, where you have to wade through the back story, character development, and misleading clues before you finally get to the real point of the message. But that doesn’t stop all kinds of people from writing like online versions of Agatha Christie. In rare cases I think this is actually a strategy on the part of these writers to bore you with so much background and irrelevant information that you quit reading before you actually get to the bad news tucked away at the end. Imagine getting a statement of your company’s finances full of charts and mysterious tax statements with a blurb tacked on at the end saying that, due to ongoing cost cutting, free coffee will no longer be available in the lunch room starting next month. The person who sent you such an email is really hoping that you don’t notice and that when the coffee makers eventually disappear they’ll be able to dismiss the whole issue by pointing out that they warned everyone about it and no one objected. People who do this are weasels.

The "Mystery Email" is also a lousy way to communicate. Most of the time people who save the important information for the end of a very long email aren’t hiding their point on purpose. They actually think they’re being helpful by providing you with a history of the project they’re working on and referring to the minutes of a meeting that happened months ago. Having been trained by English teachers to write five paragraph essays that back up their ideas with plenty of evidence, they’ve simply continued using the same tactics and are now writing five paragraph emails that are never going to be read.

If you want to fall back on a format that many of us learned in high school consider choosing the old model of the inverted pyramid from journalism class instead, where you find the most important information and a summary of what will follow at the beginning of a news article. Email and news stories actually have a lot in common-- think of your subject line and first sentence as the headline and lead of a news story. Both should be designed to summarize the whole message that follows and to draw in readers. Headlines in big, bold fonts sell newspapers and meaningful subject lines sell email messages. If you save the important stuff for the end of your email, very few of your readers are going to get there. And it’s never a good idea to make your readers work hard if you want to get your message across. Unless obfuscating information that you don’t want your readers to notice is what you have in mind, start with what’s most important. As a bonus, you’ll probably wind up writing shorter messages if you manage to get your main points out at the beginning. Your readers will thank you.