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​How Did We Get Here?

The first email message was sent in 1971 by a computer engineer called Ray Tomlinson. He can’t remember the exact date he sent his email or what he wrote. The Queen sent an email in 1976 on Arpanet, but it wasn’t until 1996 that a few companies - including the fledgling Hotmail - began to offer free, use-anywhere, internet email. Fast forward to today and we have more than 4.1 billion email accounts across the globe. Approximately 294 billion emails are sent every day; roughly 78% of them are spam.

Email has one defining quality: it’s fast. Your message can travel the globe and reach multiple recipients in seconds. It takes even less than a second to ‘cc’ another recipient into your email or click ‘Reply all.’ In roughly twenty years, email has transformed the way we communicate in all spheres. In our businesses, workplaces, governments, and organisations, email has become pervasive and acutely problematic.

Email’s success is also its curse. The ease with which a message can be transmitted, copied, multiplied and made public has left many of us feeling as if we are drowning in email. Collectively, we have created a modern tragedy of the commons. Furthermore, no-one seems to be in charge. What does everyone else consider to be good manners when it comes to style, tone and content for an email? And, is there, a best practice standard in email land?
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TED Curator Chris Anderson crystalized this view in a blog post in 2011. His basic premise was that email takes us more time to process than it does to create.  

“This is a problem that can’t be solved by individuals acting alone,” he said. “Email stress comes from all the unanswered emails in your inbox, and the fear that you may be causing offense or frustration to your friends and colleagues. If we can mutually agree some different ground rules, that stress can go away.”

​From here sprang the idea of the email charter: http://www.emailcharter.org/

​We’ve Had This Problem Before

The collective sense of frustration, fear and anxiety that swirls around our latest piece of communication technology is an old one. We can find a similar disruptive period if we go back to 1440-1450, when German metal worker, John Guttenberg, first conceived of movable type page-setting and combined this technology with oil-based ink and wine presses. The days of laborious copying of manuscripts by hand were over; fast mass production and distribution of the written word had begun.
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The resultant modern printing presses were a transformative technology that precipitated massive societal change. The shift from script to print changed our intellectual and symbolic lives. The ease with which we could transmit our thoughts, share other’s ideas and co-operate together to create wholly new philosophies created a new consciousness; individualism. Historians now consider the printing press to be a key driving factor behind the significant cultural and religious transformations that subsequently swept Europe: the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.
 
The exponential growth of this new mass produced written word also demanded that its users accept uniformity. The written word had to, by necessity, become consistent and reliable. We developed a stable grammar, uniform spelling, and regular punctuation. Readers began to expect that they should consistently be able to interpret a writer’s abstract ideas. And so we come to today’s problem. How do we collectively manage our latest transformative communication technology: email? 

​Choosing Your Path 
 
Make your subject line work for you. Write your subject line last to ensure it sums up or captures the essence of your email’s content.

• Ask yourself: is my subject line relevant and unambiguous?
• Does my subject line provide a clear context for my readers?

 
Follow all accepted writing conventions. Don’t let email’s simplicity deceive you. You are dealing with written text. Write in full words using fully punctuated, grammatically correct, complete sentences. Avoid acronyms. 
 
Create a ‘top down’ structure. Business writing needs to be top heavy; put your most important information first. Structure your email in order of importance from most important to least important, from your reader’s point of view.
 
Use an opening address and don’t forget to sign off. Whether you use a relaxed, ‘Hi Kaitlyn…’ or the more formal, ‘Dear Ms Hohepa...’ will depend on who your reader is and the purpose of your email. When you finish, make sure your reader knows who you are by giving your name and affiliation as appropriate. Always remain respectful.
 
Keep it short. Emails are often read on mobile devices where they can appear even longer. If your email is going to exceed more than one desktop screen length, consider sending an attachment or use sub-headings to help your reader negotiate their way through your text. Keep your email paragraphs short, no more than four sentences.
 
Tighten your threads. For communication to be clear it must have a clear context. If your thread has gone beyond five emails you should consider:

• cutting irrelevant conversations within the thread
• re-writing a new subject line 
• picking up the phone.

 
Avoid graphics, headings and tables. Email text is based on HTML (hypertext mark-up language) your layout and formatting might not appear as you intended. Attach Word Documents or PDF’s instead.

​Finally
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Attributed to Mark Twain is the quote, “History doesn’t repeat, it echoes.” It’s a useful analogy for us to keep in mind when we consider the often maddening impact email has on our daily lives. However, we’ve negotiated the disruptive forces of new communication technologies before and, on balance, we’ve come out the better for it. We must also accept that language, the myriad ways we employ and manipulate it, and the means by which we communicate, is a glorious, constantly moving feast. Language is messy, organic, unpredictable, and continually evolving because we are. Our language is simply a reflection of us, its users. 

Step 1
Show the way. Lead the change you want to see every day - mentor, reinforce, and evaluate.

Provide explicit direction; make sure your writers know exactly what you want. Can they provide you with the answers to the following questions?

1. Who is my target audience? What do they need to know? What might they already know? What information will they respond to best?

     2. What are my goals? Am I informing? Persuading? Directing? 


Provide constructive feedback: “I lost meaning in this section because your sentences do not have a clear subject and an active verb pattern.”  Or “The final summary of your report has been written in the passive voice, please change to the active.” Or “Paragraph X is unnecessary for this audience.”  


Provide quality exemplars and regularly share examples of good writing. Make it clear that the act of writing for a reader is relational. Just as readers use strategies to decipher text and meaning so must writers use strategies to infuse their text with meaning for readers.

Step 2
Take your time. Building a new skill happens slowly, your writers will need space to review, evaluate, and reflect.

Create communities of practice. Pair weaker writers with stronger writers. Give weaker writers opportunities to observe the thinking and actions of stronger writers. Encourage weaker writers to emulate their stronger colleagues.  


Make time for writers to peer review each other’s writing. Opportunities that allow for reflection and evaluation will deepen a writer’s understanding of effective writing and reinforce their use of effective writing strategies.  
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Ask yourself - is it will or skill? For very poor writers, there may be literacy and/or learning disabilities. Put in place scaffolds of support. Provide non-judgemental writing buddies to help with revising and proofreading. Provide editing services or one on one coaching. Invest in I.T. solutions; there are many excellent speech to text apps available online. 

Step 3
Create opportunities for change. Our actions will always speak louder than our words.

Provide training opportunities:
   1. Make sure you know your writers’ needs first. Ensure any instruction is going to meet the specific needs of your writers. One size does not fit all.
  2. After training follow up with mini clinics, one on one coaching opportunities and team peer review sessions. Your writers will need multiple opportunities to reinforce their new skills and behaviours before they become automatic.  


Keep in mind that learning a new skill is risky, there’s always the chance we might fail. Give your writers opportunities to embed, trial, and take risks without fear of ridicule.  


Provide fortnightly, monthly or quarterly writing clinics. Highlight that all effective writers have strategies that support them through the writing process. They: define their audience, organise their ideas, gather information, research, analyse, draft, revise and edit.  
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Create a quarterly newsletter or email that shares examples of quality writing at your place. Highlight those writers who have improved and/or excelled recently. Include writing tips and strategies. Circulate online links to teaching and coaching websites.