Remember the days when we would just pick up the phone and dial an extension number to ask a co-worker a question?
Emails, texts, and messaging programs have certainly changed our way of working. On the positive side, we probably accomplish more because we don’t need to stop what we are doing to talk to someone to convey a simple message.
However, according to popular communication theory, only 7% of our message is conveyed from the words we choose, 38% comes from the tone, and 55% of a message is conveyed by body language. With an email or a text actually being a jumble of words or a series of emoticons, we should be especially careful about the words we are using and how they might be interpreted in an email without body language to back them up.
Here are a few rules from mindtools.com to help you get your emails noticed, acted upon and taken the right way.
Don’t over communicate by email
Avoid sharing sensitive or personal information in an email, and don’t write about anything that you, or the subject of your email, wouldn’t like to see plastered on a billboard by your office. And whenever possible, deliver bad news in person. This helps you to communicate with empathy, compassion, and understanding.
Make good use of subject lines
The subject line of your email message should grab your attention, and summarize the content. A blank subject line is more likely to be overlooked or rejected as “spam”, so always use a few well-chosen words to tell the recipient what the email is about.
Keep messages clear and brief
People are more likely to read short, concise emails than long, rambling ones, so make sure that your emails are as short as possible, without excluding necessary information.
Check your tone
Your choice of words, sentence length, punctuation, and capitalization can easily be misinterpreted without visual and auditory cues. So, be polite. “Please” and “thank you” go a long way, whether written or spoken.
Proofread
Your email messages are a part of your professional image, so it looks bad to send out a message that contains typos or bad grammar.
