by Emil Hunefalk

Created on: April 23, 2010

Most people who are new to digital communication and content would argue that the basics of writing an email include three things:

1. Recipient email address

2. Subject

3. Text

However, this argument would forget a few points, primarily regarding email etiquette, which should be seen as part of basic email writing knowledge (as should the somewhat wider term "netiquette", which refers to creating content of any kind online). This is for a number of simple reasons, where the most important probably is that in the end you want the recipient(s) to understand what the email is about, know the context and if necessary be able to act on it. Part of email etiquette would also be considering if an email actually needs to be sent at all, or if would break a recipients concentration and work flow without adding anything of value - but let's take one part of the basics at a time.

To help recipients understand the meaning and value of an email it's important for all involved to know the context - which is most often done by writing an informative subject, such as "Regarding our meeting on Thursday" or "About next phase of Project XYZ", where everyone involved has prior knowledge and/or interest in the subject.

For email body text, we need to remember some golden rules regarding digital content, primarily asking  "Is everything in this email necessary?" and "Have I made it clear enough?". For people receiving and sending many email, it is extra important to know at a first glance what an email is about, and to quickly find the point and value of an email to be able to be efficient and take rapid action if needed. Many people who are new to writing for screen have a habit of writing as if it were a hand written letter, where nothing is removed once it is written, and the writer can add quite a bit extra regarding topics not necessary for the recipient to know or for anyone to take action on. On the contrary, email is a medium suited for short, informative communication with actionable content.

One golden rule in writing for the web is to first write down what you want to say and what you want the reader to take away from reading your text. After you believe the text is ready for publishing (or sending, in the case of email), edit the text so that half of it is removed - leaving it a leaner version getting sooner to the point. Edit it to leave half the amount of text as many times as you can, and when you believe it's as short and efficient as possible make one last edit. This method will teach you how to write shorter texts, and will save recipients a vast amount of time - instead of trying to find the value of a received email. This golden rule should however not intrude too much about explaining the context of the email, as this is needed for the final efficiency of both reading and writing email.

Moving on to attachments, it is important to remember that not all people have an excellent broadband connection at any given time - meaning you should be wary of including very large files. Even sending multiple photos could be too much, if the photos have a large resolution and have a large file size. You can instead consider setting up an account at a photo sharing site such as Flickr or Picasa. Other sharing services exist for basically any type of file you want to send, meaning there is often no reason to actually include files in an email - even when sending files within a company, you could instead create a shared space on the servers where people can put files for the recipient to retrieve. However, with regards to files, every case is different, so see this more as suggestions than "laws" or guidelines.

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