A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Context

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood ducky@webfoot.com

In a conversation, there is some minimum of shared context. You might be in the same physical location, and even on the phone you have, at minimum, commonality of time. When you generate a document for paper, usually there is some context embedded in the medium: the text is in the proceedings of a conference, written on a birthday card, handed in to your Econ 101 professor with a batch of other Econ 101 term papers, or something similar.

With email, you can't assume anything about your correspondent's location, time, frame of mind, mood, health, marital status, affluence, age, or gender. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your reader some context.

Useful Subject Lines

A subject line that pertains clearly to the email body is a good way to get people in the right context to receive your message. It should be brief (as many mailers will truncate long subject lines), does not need to be a complete sentence, and should pertain to the subject.

If you are responding to email, your mailer should preface the subject line with "Re:" or "RE:" (for REgarding). If your mail program doesn't do this, it would be polite to put in the "RE:" by hand.

If you are offering non-urgent information that requires no response from the other person, prefacing the subject line with "FYI:" (For Your Information) is not a bad idea, as in

	Subject: FYI: donuts in break room

For time-critical messages, prepending "URGENT:" is a good idea (especially if you know the person gets a lot of email):

	Subject: URGENT: meeting w/CEO moved

For requests, prepending "REQ:" can work:

	Subject: REQ: current budget est

Do me a favor and eliminate the word "information" from your subject lines, and maybe from the body of your message as well. (This is one of my pet peeves, sorry.) As webmaster for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I got a lot of email that looked like this:

	Subject: information
	Please send me information about UIUC.

This gave me very little clue as to what the person wanted to know about: admission application deadlines? The number of faculty? The acreage? The number of buildings? Am I supposed to send paper documents or give URLs? The only thing I could do with email like this was ask for further context. Mail like this would have been much better as

	Subject: UIUC history
	Are there any Web pages that pertain to the history of 
	the U of I?

Quoting Documents

If you are referring to previous email, you should explicitly quote that document to provide context.

Instead of sending email that says:

yes

Say:

	> Are you going to have the left-handed thromblemeister specs
	> done by Thursday?
	yes

The ">" here is a relatively standard convention for quoting someone else's words.

Imagine getting a response on Monday to some email that you think maybe you sent on Friday:

	I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
	the other one before they make up their minds.

(Huh???)

You'd probably be much happier with:

	> I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassembly 
	> ready; as soon as I get a decision on the 
	> thromblemeister selection, I'll be ready to go.  
	> Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether 
	> they are ready to go with the left-handed thrombo or 
	> do they want to wait and check out the right-handed 
	> one first?
        I talked to them about it the other day, and they want to see
        the other one before they make up their minds.

This is substantially better, but now errs on the side of too much context. You shouldn't have to wade through gobs of extraneous stuff to get to the meat of the message. You should include just enough to provide a context for the message and no more. (Peter Kimble, my high school CS teacher, now gives his students the rule of thumb that at least half of the lines in an email message should be their own.) If you must include the whole message that you are replying to, include it after your response.

You would probably be even more pleased with:

	> Have you talked to the thermo guys
	I talked to the thermo group on Wednesday, and they 
	think the left-handed thromblemeister will probably 
	work, but they want to evaluate the right-handed unit 
	before they make up their minds.

Note that here there is the right amount of context, and the answer is very clear and specific. A good rule of thumb is to look very carefully at all pronouns in your first three sentences. If they don't refer to something explicitly stated in the email, change them to something concrete.

If the sentence is in the middle of a paragraph, or wraps around lines, go ahead and remove everything but the part that you were really interested in, inserting "[...]" if you have to take something out in the middle. If you need to substitute a value for a pronoun, go ahead but put the value in square brackets:

	> [The thermo guys] want to evaluate the 
	> right-handed unit 
	Fine.  The right-handed unit should be here
	by Thursday; I'll phone them the minute it hits
	my desk.

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Ducky

Modified 5 Apr 1995
Modified 30 Dec 1995 - added subject line section, minor editing elsewhere

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