Transcript: Using Email Effectively

HadleyUsing Email EffectivelyPresented by Larry MuffetDate June 24th, 2015

Colleen WunderlichI’m Colleen Wunderlich and I am the Director of the Forsythe Center for Employment and Entrepreneurship here at Hadley. Today I would like to introduce our speaker, Larry Muffet, and many of you know Larry because he has conducted our seminars on a weekly basis. Larry works for Hadley as an Instructional Design Specialist, right?

Larry MuffetCorrect.

Colleen WunderlichOkay, and so I’d like to introduce Larry today, and he is going to give us some useful tips on email, how to communicate professionally using email. So Larry, welcome.

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Larry MuffetThanks, Colleen. It’s a real treat to be on the other side of the microphone as it were today, and I’m really looking forward to – excited about this and looking forward to it. I just want to let folks know that I’m not sort of coming at this from the corner. I teach a business communications class as an Adjunct Instructor for ITT Technical Institute, and I’ve been teaching there for about six years and I’ve just made some observations down through the years, not only from teaching people about email but just observing email. So I’m going to share tips and pointers and some techniques that I think can help you use it more effectively, but I’m going to start off by throwing out some numbers for you.

It’s estimated there’s approximately seven and a half billion people on planet earth, and it’s also estimated that 2.5 billion people use email. So ruminate on that for just a second. A third of the planet is using this particular medium we’re going to talk about today. Obviously, it must be doing something right, and people must get some value out of it to get that kind of a growth. However are people, out of those 2.5 billion, how many of them are really using it well and effectively? My own personal observation says yes to me, that the answer is not as many as should be.

Here’s a personal vignette that sort of illustrates a point I want to make. I once worked for an organization that had a very rigid hierarchy goal structure, and every written letter that went out had to be reviewed by several layers of

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management, sometimes even by the president of the organization himself. Yet at the same time, every single day hundreds of emails were going out from all kinds of personnel, inside the organization and out, with no oversight whatsoever, emails that had the same legal implications and the same impact on people’s view of the organizations as those letters that were reviewed 18 times. My view is this. Email deserves and frankly demands the same level of planning, thought and attention to detail that is directed towards written communication. Poor email use can lead you to all sorts of problems, from bad impressions of you or the organization that you work for, to negative impacts in your career, all the way up to legal issues.

So the purpose of today’s seminar is sort of to give you some tips and techniques to use this medium more effectively. Using email more effectively, not only helps you, but it’s also good for the person that’s receiving your email, and it’s good for the organization for which you work. Before I begin, let me state that today’s seminar is mainly concerned with business or professional email. If you’re messaging with your childhood friend, and you want to neglect the subject line or misspell words or use a bunch of LOL’s and BTW’s and paste on a bunch of smiley faces, feel free absolutely. No problem with that whatsoever but let me just say this. All of that sort of thing is out of place in a business context and we’ll talk more about that.

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So today we’re going to start off and talk a little bit about the history of email. How did this thing come about? I’m going to present to you a three-step technique that I’m going to offer to you that I think you should use in any sort of business communication to sharpen up your communication skills, and then what I’m going to do is break down each element of an email message and go over it and present some best practices for using them more effectively. So how did this thing we call email, that two and a half billion people around the world are using, how did this all come about? Did we wake up one day and the day before, we had no email and then the next day we had email? Not really.

Email evolved more than it was actually invented by any one person. Actually, sort of a fascinating thing, email is actually older than the internet. Going way back to the early days of computers, generally an organization would have or a business would have a big mainframe computer and generally had one terminal in the office for people to use, and email sort of originated from the idea that if I wanted to leave a message for Colleen on this big mainframe computer, I could leave a message in her user’s directory and that’s pretty much the genesis from which email you know was born and raised from. Then when we got into a thing where we had computers tied up with each other, we had to sort of develop an addressing system, much like the U.S. mail. So this is where they @ sign and the name of the computer that you wanted to send that particular message to came about.

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So in the evolution, in 1982 there were one thousand email users around the planet. By 1985, that number had bumped up to 250 thousand users. By 1992, Outlook was created and we got up to about five million email users. By 1993, AOL came online and email use went up to seven million users. In the interim, Yahoo, Google Mail, the iPhone, globalization, iPads and a whole variety of other technological innovations have come which have increased the number to approximately 2.5 billion users. In fact, many IT analysts will tell you that they think that the internet or the email was the most important application of the internet. So obviously, email has been and will continue to be a key medium of communication.

So I’m going to give you now a simple, three-step technique that you can use to help you communicate more effectively. It’s called the Three-Step Writing Process and I think this particular process, I would advise you to use it or make it a habit to use, not only for email but for any form of nonverbal communications, and those three steps are number one, planning. Number two, writing and number three, completing and I’m going to go through each one of these steps in more detail. What’s involved in the planning process in step one? First thing you need to do is before you ever start writing that email, consider what is the general purpose of this message? Are you looking to inform people? Are you looking to persuade the receiver, or is it some sort of collaborative effort?

The next step is to sort of drill down and send – and then determine what’s the specific purpose you’re trying to

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accomplish? So another way of thinking of that is, what do you hope to accomplish by sending this particular message, or what should the audience do or think about after they get it? Now if you ask people on the street, if I got a bunch of people and just asked them their thoughts about email, I guarantee that a big, big percentage of them would say I get too many of them. There’s too much junk. The whole word “spam” got coined to talk about this idea of people getting useless emails or unnecessary emails or emails from people they don’t want to hear from, and they’re just getting swamped with email. So we don’t want to be part of the problem. We all want to be part of the solution.

So to avoid being part of that problem, to avoid sending unnecessary emails, I got four questions you want to ask yourself before you ever send a message, okay, and you use these four questions for an email. You can send them for an instant message. You can use them for Twitter, use them for whatever. They’re four pretty good questions to ask yourself before you send a message. Okay, question number one, will anything change as a result of this message? What I’m talking about here is if you are on the lowest level of an organization, and the three vice presidents in the chamber or in the chairman of the board get together and develop a new marketing campaign for the organization and you don’t like it, sending an email to the CEO telling him that you don’t like what they came up with is probably not only not going to change anything but probably not going to do you very much good from a career standpoint. So the first question should ask

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yourself, will anything change as a result of this message? If it’s not, then you really have to ask yourself would you need to send this or not.

Okay, second question you need to ask yourself, is the purpose of this email realistic? For example, if my corporation that I work for just declared bankruptcy, it’s probably not realistic for me to send an email to my supervisor asking for a ten percent raise. Oaky, so we need to ask ourselves is the purpose realistic and it’s – and if it is not, again probably not a good idea to send an email, probably makes it unnecessary. Third question you need to ask yourself, is this the right time? If somebody is dealing with their peak, busy hour of the day, maybe you should send it before that peak. Maybe you should send it after that peak time. So again, ask the question is this the right time to send the email message?

Question number four, is the purpose acceptable to your organization? Does it violate policy? Is it in accordance with the law? And one of the things I would point out to you here is do not violate the chain of command. You know many organizations nowadays are, they’ve sort of flattened out the chain of command and people are more flexible about that, but they’re still quite a few organizations where you will get yourself in some trouble. You might be standing in front of somebody’s desk explaining things about why you jumped over your supervisor’s head and wrote to his boss, instead of going through the chain of command. So that’s another thing you need to ask yourself. Is the purpose acceptable to the

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organization? Does it fit in with policy? Does it follow the chain of command? Yes.

Colleen WunderlichSo just to clarify a couple of things, Larry, you make some really good points about really thinking about whether or not your email message is going to be effective because you could waste a lot of time crafting an email message that isn’t going to achieve its purpose anyway, you know based on the points that you just mentioned, and your point about you know the chain of command. Because we have access to everybody’s email in the address book in an organization that we work in, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should use that email, right? So we should like you said, don’t jump over a supervisor. We should probably make sure that the email is going to be received or that our supervisors isn’t going to be threatened by an email that we sent.

Larry MuffetThat’s absolutely right. It’s sort of an algosin thing, that I could cut my steak with a razor sharp axe but it doesn’t mean I should do it. I mean just because I can do something doesn’t mean I necessarily should do something. So just because you have everyone’s email address in the organization doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be emailing them. You need to follow that chain of command so excellent point.

Colleen Wunderlich

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And also when you say will anything change as a result, I mean it can also be perceived as a complaint, right? If it’s – if you write an email and nothing’s going to change, then you just look like a complainer.

Larry MuffetYeah, you can look like a complainer or even at the very best, the person’s going to say, “Well, I didn’t need you to get that email.” Here’s another example. If you – if some decision has been reached, and the person who’s sent out the thing, say in the report let’s say, and 27 people on the email list have already said hey, nice job, do you really need to send an email and be the 28th person to say nice job? I mean after a while, I’m not sure that that accomplishes anything, and it just jams up everybody’s email mailbox. So again, kind of try to think through some of these things before you get started.

Colleen WunderlichAnd you can – also there could be a decision already made. There could have been a meeting already had that you might not be aware of, and you’re writing an email about something that’s already been decided and discussed and really wasted your time. You’ve wasted everyone’s time who’s reading it and it’s like you said, it’s ineffective.

Larry MuffetIt’s ineffective and worse case, you know you’re going to irritate your supervisor which is probably not the best thing to do from a career standpoint.

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Colleen WunderlichOkay.

Larry MuffetOkay, so once you’ve asked yourself those four questions, if you can answer them and you’ve got the answers that come back and say yeah, I should send this email, the next thing you want to do is do some sort of audience profile or receiver profile. First of all, identify who is going to be receiving this particular email. If it’s going out to more than one person, you want to identify the size and the geographical location of the audience or the receivers. Again, are you sending out to 25 people within your own building or are you sending it out to 25 people scattered around the world? Which is one of the beauties of having email in the first place. So that makes a difference about how we’re going to – if we’re sending things and it’s going to 25 different people around the world, they may not all speak the language. They may not have all the same culture. So again, these are things to take into consideration before you draft and send your email message.

Feeding right into that is the idea of determining who’s the composition of the audience, age, education level; what language they speak, culture, their rank in the organizations, their level of experience, their attitudes, their motivations. Obviously, you can’t always determine all of these things to your complete satisfaction, but if you

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can – if you know some of these people and you have some idea about this stuff, it sort of helps you do this correctly before you get started and again, we’ll talk about something later on about, even so much as simple as font size. If you know that somebody in the audience has low vision, you probably want to increase the font size. So that’s again, knowing your audience composition really helps you to do a good job of being effective with this.

Another question to ask yourself is what is the level of understanding of the people who are going to get this email? So if there’s a situation going on at work, you need to bring everybody up to speed about it or does everybody already know and basically, all you need to do is come with the recommendation or request or whatever there is? So what is their level of understanding about what it is you’re talking about. It makes a difference about how you’re going to draft this particular message and then audience expectations and preferences. Are the people you’re writing to, are they the kind of people that want to see everything spelled out in excruciating detail, or are they the type of people that want to see things in bullet points that they can skim over? So again, it makes a difference about how we’re going to put this together and then lastly, and this is kind of important. If you can, what you want to do is sort of forecast the probable reaction of the person or persons getting this email. The reason I bring that up is, it effects how the information is going to be organized in the body of your message.

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There’s something called the direct versus the indirect approach which I’m going to talk about a little bit later, but if you can forecast the audience reaction, you can massage how you present that information, organize it slightly difference, whether people are going to be in favor of it or hostile to it and it again, can increase the effectiveness of your message. So once you’ve done all that and you’ve sort of planned through all this, then you go out and gather the information and considering your audience perception, you try to come up with information, data, evidence, whatever you want to say that will convince them. So if you know that certain people, certain types of information or a certain type of arguments or certain ways are presented are very effective with them, that’s the way you want to do it.

So another planning consideration, what mediums am I going to send this message out? Now obviously, we’re in an email seminar today, but email’s not always the right choice. So let’s talk about when email is the right medium. Email’s the right choice as a medium when number one, you need to contact somebody who’s hard to reach by phone or hard to meet with. So that’s first question. Email’s really good for those types of situations. You can’t get somebody on the phone, well, at least I can send them an email, or I’d like to meet face to face with them but they’re very busy. I can’t get an appointment. Email’s a really good medium of communication for those situations.

Email’s the right medium when the information is not time sensitive, and I know somebody’s probably thinking to

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themselves, well, email’s instantaneously practically. So it would seem like it would be a good thing for time sensitive information. Here’s the problem. If I write to somebody at their work address on Friday afternoon, they may not check that email again until Monday morning. So if there’s something that’s truly time sensitive, that’s probably not the best medium of communication. It’s probably better that I get somebody on the phone. Okay, number three, email’s a great medium to use when you need to send a document or an electronic file. That’s one of the main benefits of having email in the first place. I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s so popular.

Number four, email’s a great medium to use if you need to distribute information to a large number of people quickly. Again, we can have an email blast that goes out to a lot of people at the same time, and it just does a really great job of conveying information to a large number of people quickly. Another time that email is really good, email’s the right medium, when you need a written record of the communications, when you sort of want to leave an electronic paper trail, when you want to have a receipt that you had this conversation, when you want to in other words, sort of cover your rear end in a situation. If things should go badly later, you’ve got some sort of documentation of what your position was and what you told people and that sort of thing. So email’s a really good medium of communications when you need to have some sort of record of the fact you had this conversation.

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Let’s flip it around however. When is email not a good medium of communication? Email’s not an effective choice when your message is long, complicated or requires additional discussion. There’s a reason when people do performance evaluations with their employees, they don’t do them by email. When you have long complicated or additional discussion, or it’s going to require additional discussion, you want to shoot for face to face. You want to have a personal meeting with that person because personal communications in the same room is a much richer form of communication because you can get all sorts of feedback from the tone of the person’s voice, from the pitch of their voice, from the speed of the message, all kinds of different things. It makes it a much richer, nonverbal medium of communication. So if you have something long, complicated, requires additional discussion, email is probably not the way to go. You probably want to do that face to face if at all possible and phone if you have no other alternative.

Colleen WunderlichYeah, and I think, too if you have some long and complicated, it doesn’t hurt to send an email and basically say I have such and such that I want to talk to you about. It’s complicated. Can I set a time to meet? So you could still use email, but the issue should be left for the meeting, don’t you think basically?

Larry MuffetOh, absolutely. I think that’s a great solution. Let them know it’s coming but sort of inform them ahead of time

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why you need to have that meeting, and it sort of sets the tone for it.

Colleen WunderlichYeah, and some people are better than others than writing their thoughts. Some people have a gift to write things really fluently, and other people who don’t write often might come across as terse or impatient or irritated. So when it’s a sensitive issue, it’s difficult to tell what the other – what the writer is actually thinking or feeling, and that can make people – it can be an ambiguous situation for the reader to know what to interpret.

Larry MuffetYeah, it’s not a very rich medium of communication. You don’t get the nonverbal stuff. You don’t get feedback right away. So if you got that kind of thing like I said, nobody does – their when they counsel their employees or they call them in for their performance appraisal, nobody does that by email. They do it face to face and there’s a reason for that because face to face is a much better medium of communication for those types of messages.

Here’s another situation when email’s not a good choice for you. If the information that you’re going to send is highly confidential. Let me say this. Electronic communications are never really private and you say well, wait a minute. I’m just sending this particular piece of information to Joe. Well, once you send it to Joe, you have no control whatsoever on what Joe does with it. So Joe could transmit that off to 47 different people without

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your knowledge. So – and plus we all have the thing about hackers and just a whole variety of things. So let’s just say that information done electronically is never really completely private. So if you’re doing something that’s really confidential, probably again, email’s not your best choice.

Colleen WunderlichDo you think, too some people are careless when they forward email? Like maybe there’s a chain and they don’t read all the way down the chain. I’ve had emails forwarded to me that have a chain of things that I can read down and see that I don’t think it was really meant for me to see.

Larry MuffetOh, absolutely. That whole forward thing, we’ll talk about that in a little bit, here in a bit but yeah, it’s – it tends to get overused and it can get out of hand, absolutely right.

Colleen WunderlichYeah.

Larry MuffetBack to the third thing when email’s not a particularly good choice for how you’re going to communicate. If the message is emotionally charged or could easily be misinterpreted. A couple things here. My suggestion to you is never hit the send button when you’re angry, and my second suggestion to you is I wouldn’t say anything – if I wouldn’t say it to their face, I wouldn’t say it in an email.

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Okay, so if you’re sending something that’s emotionally charged, you probably want to think about it. You probably want to maybe dwell on it for a while and maybe draw – write up a draft and set it aside and think about it, but it’s never a good idea to send something when you’re angry because again, just like we talked about electronic communication is never really private. Electronic communication lasts forever. So it’s always going to be there. It’s always going to be out and about, floating about the ether. So be very careful about – email’s not a particularly good medium to use when you’re mad or angry, or your message could easily be misinterpreted.

Colleen WunderlichYeah, I like the idea about preparing it in a draft you know and not putting the person’s address in the address line, so that it doesn’t accidently get sent to them and just writing it out and saving it and going back and looking at it later. I mean I’ve had some times where I’ve rewritten an email three or four times, if I read it and I think that’s definitely coming from my narrow point of view and later on in the day, it didn’t reflect how I felt earlier.

Larry MuffetAbsolutely and the situation, if you’re in a really fluid, dynamic situation the situation may change. You might be angry about something and then five minutes later, after you’ve sent this angry email, you know it’s like well, I was just coming in to talk to you and tell you that you know the situation has changed or it came out in your benefit and

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now you don’t particularly look good. You look like a grump because you sent this angry email out. So again, not a good idea to use email when you’re emotionally charged.

All right, so once we decided that email makes sense. It’s the right medium to send our message, now we want to organize our information and again, don’t skimp on this particular step. Good organization assists with proper understanding of the message. The person receiving your email will thank you. Whether they actually verbally thank you or not, they will be thanking you for the fact that it’s easy to understand what you’re trying to get across. If – let me say this. I’m going to say something similar to this many times. If you’re writing is confused or disorganized, I’m sad to say that people are likely to conclude that your thinking is confused and disorganized.

If your writing has a lot of grammatical and punctuational errors, one what people’s first impressions going to be? That you’re sloppy and disorganized, and you don’t have a good handle on the English language. First impressions, very important and a lot of times when you’re dealing with people you don’t know and you’re sending them these messages, you want to make sure that you’re sending out the proper impression. One of the ways to do that is organize your information before you get started. Okay, you’re going to save both your time and the receiver’s time.

Colleen Wunderlich

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Well, you know I have a situation, Larry, that I was hiring for a position here and I had been communicating with someone, and their emails were consistently sloppy and they didn’t know that I considered them in my mind as somebody who might be good for this particular position. They had no idea but when the position came up, and I started thinking about who I might contact you know after advertising it, I decided this person, although they had great credentials and background, was not a good fit because we’re a school and we have to care about the formatting and how things come out in writing, and I think this person might have been dictating or might have just been sloppy, but I decided that because on a consistent basis, their email was sloppy, I didn’t want to consider them because I felt that they would convey an unprofessional image for our school the way that they communicated in their email.

Larry MuffetThat’s exactly right and that’s – sadly that’s – well, I guess it isn’t really sadly but that’s the common sort of thing, so that much like if you put your resume online, you better make sure that your resume is crystal clear and contains no errors because you’re putting your resume out there on the worldwide web for millions and millions of people around the globe to look at it, and it’s their first impression of you. So again, how you organize and make sure that you’re well-organized and you’re not disorganized is going to send a positive message about you and your way of thinking.

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Colleen WunderlichAnd don’t you think it should really carry the same weight as a formal business letter, an email?

Larry MuffetOh, absolutely. I’ve talked about this before. An email carries the same legal implications as a written document. So if you do things, you know if you’re talking about HIPAA regulations or educational data, you know you can violate the same laws by sending an email that you could by sending out a written letter. So it’s something you need to be very careful about. Now here’s a little tip for you from me to you. When you’re organizing how you’re going to present your information, you can choose either the direct or indirect approach, depending on how you guessed the receiver’s going to take your main idea. So the thing is this. The direct approach you use when your audience is going to be receptive or at least neutral. Okay, so if you think the audience is going to like your idea or at least be neutral on it, start with your recommendation or conclusion or request and then lay out your supporting evidence.

On the flip side, if you suspect that the audience is going to skeptical or resistant to your idea, start by laying out your evidence, and once you’ve laid out all the evidence, then state your recommendation or conclusion or request. It’s much the way that an attorney in court would you know lay out the evidence and then ask for them to make the

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conclusion that so and so is guilty. So again, direct approach we use when the audience is going to be receptive. That’s get right to the point and then show the evidence. If you think people are going to skeptical, lay out the evidence. Then state your main point. It’s a nice way of organizing information. It tends to be a little bit more effective.

One last thing on this in the planning stage, if you’re writing something truly important and it’s on the longish side, you might want to take a few minutes to jot down, make yourself an outline. I just feel like an outline when I’m writing an important document just really helps me to organize my thoughts and present them in a more effective way. So I realize if you’re just sending a “hi, how you doing” to mom you don’t need an outline, but if you’re sending something like a proposal to somebody that’s an important contract involved take some time. Organize your thoughts. Lay it out in an outline before you start writing. You know this might be a good opportunity, we’re sort of at the halfway point, if – see if there’s any questions in the audience.Colleen WunderlichOkay.

Larry MuffetSo I’m going to turn the microphone loose here. If anybody wants to jump in, feel free.

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CallerThis is Olivia Ostergard. I had a question concerning, like you mentioned the emails part. You know sometimes and a lot of times in our emails, we’ll get pictures and photos. I’m working right now on a flyer for a book signing that I’m going to be doing next month, and I’ve been having some trouble trying to get the thing, figure out how to get the email part to people I want to send it to. Any ideas?

Larry MuffetWell, I’m not sure. Are you talking about pasting pictures in to the body of the email or making them attachments? I’m not sure exactly. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

CallerAttachments particularly or for instance, it’s got – it’s in Acrobat, but it’s like you know the Office Depot sent me the flyer with the you know, the proof and stuff. There’s – it’s a picture but there’s writing in it, too and when I tried to put it in my document file, it’s in as an Acrobat, but I want to send it with [inaudible 0:30:26] and everything. What do I need to do, or do I need to let him know what I need to do as far as accessibility goes?

Larry MuffetThat’s an excellent question. I’m afraid I’m probably not the best one to answer on that, but if you can shoot me an email, I’ll leave my email address on here before we go, I can get you an answer on that one. Got other questions from the audience before we move on?

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CallerHi, I had a question. Are you going to be speaking at all about how to send group emails?

Larry MuffetA little bit about that. We’re going to talk about that, particularly the address line and how to handle that, and I see somebody made the comment “reply all” and we’re going to talk about that and they made the comment “reply all” org and that’s exactly pretty much where I’m going to comment on it. So yeah, we are going to talk about that. Other questions, comments, thoughts? All right, hearing none, let’s move on.

So the first of the three-step writing process is the planning stage which we just covered. So what happens during the writing phase? Again, I want to caution everybody that business email is a lot more formal than conversing with your friends. Okay, so in business situations, we want to make sure that we don’t be a little – we want to be a little bit more formal. We want to be a little bit more careful than when we do conversations with our best friends.

Okay, in business situations, it’s a good practice to get in what’s called the “you” attitude, writing in terms of the reader’s wishes, interests, hopes and preferences. So a way of illustrating that, instead of writing “Tuesday is the only day we promise you quick response to your request”, turn it around but the “you” emphasis would be “if you

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need a quick response, please submit your request on Tuesday”. Instead of saying “we have vanilla, chocolate and strawberry,” you can use – it’s better to say “you can select from vanilla, chocolate or strawberry.” It’s just a little sort of orientation from a business standpoint that you’re receptive to the other person and their needs and wants and desires.

Always use a positive emphasis. It may sound strange but you can deliver negative news without being negative. Always be professional and polite. We want to always project the image of our organization, whatever that is. Okay, one of the things that I caution people about and I see this in my class all the time is, avoid jargon, buzz words, emoticons and acronyms, okay. Jargon is like the technical stuff. So if you’re talking to somebody at your same job level, and you’re talking about some technical thing that went on at work, if you want to use jargon from work, that’s perfectly fine but if you’re writing to somebody outside the organization, they don’t know all the little slang stuff and they don’t know all the little technical words. So you probably want to stay away from that.

Buzz words, we all you know are familiar with that. Emoticons are not appropriate in a business message and you want to stay away from all the LOL’s, BTW. One of the things I see with my students all the time when they start class is, they’ll send me an email and instead of writing out Y-O-U for you, they just put a capital U, unacceptable in a business standpoint, okay. Choose powerful words. What I mean by that is, you want to stay

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away from well, kind of, sort of, maybe type of stuff and be more definitive. If you can’t make a definitive statement, something to the effect of the results were inconclusive is a much more powerful and clear thing than just saying well, maybe, I’m not sure, ought to, sort of kind of thing. So choose powerful words.

Colleen WunderlichWell, I think it’s okay, too to say I can’t make a decision on that right now.

Larry MuffetAbsolutely.

Colleen WunderlichBetter than just saying maybe. I can’t make a decision. I can see both sides. Let me give it some thought and I’ll get back to you, but at least you’re making a definitive statement to the person. Because if you just put maybe out there, I mean that’s – what have you really accomplished by some word that just infers that you’re just contemplating and you haven’t made a decision? What have you really accomplished? Nothing.

Larry MuffetThat’s absolutely right and you know this whole kind of, sort of sort of thing, you know what people define, describe those as is weasel words you know.

Colleen Wunderlich

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Exactly.

Larry MuffetBecause you’re sort of weaseling around, and you’re not taking a position and while that might be effective on the campaign trail, it’s not particularly effective in the business world, okay, and again, remember emails carry the same legal weight as the majority of written documents. So you can – contract acceptance from something you say in an email is just the same as if you did it in writing, okay? Now the completion phase, do not please. Whatever you do, do not short this particular part of the process. Don’t shortchange yourself. Here’s a little anecdote from my business communications class. One of the exercises that I always do with people is, I have them all write a letter and I say, “Okay, you want to make sure that this is a really good letter because it’s going to be graded.”

So they’ll turn it in and then what I do is, I make a copy of it and I give it to another classmate, and I say, “Now I want you to find all the mistakes in this letter and you’re going to get a grade on that.” So they basically become a proofreader, and I grade them on their job as a proofreader. Well, the thing that I always find fascinating is people will find – in this other person’s letter, they’ll find all the mistakes. They find some that I don’t even find sometimes, and yet, and yet they’ll have the same very mistakes in their own letter. So what that tells me is, they’re not proofreading properly. They know how to proofread. They’re just not taking the time to do that. Please do not short yourself on this particular step. This is

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so important. Proofreading and revising messages is vital because if you have errors, the receiver is going to make negative conclusions about you, your organization and how that organization does business and that can never be positive. Okay, so time spent on proofing is going to save you time and it’s going to save you some headaches.

Just a suggestion to you, too. If you have time, we don’t always have time in this world, but if you have time write something. Set it aside. Walk away from it. Do something else. Come back to it an hour later and proof it again because a lot of times it’s the whole concept if you get lost – you can’t see the forest for the trees. So we’re so immersed in writing that message that we don’t really sort of see it properly or we can’t read it properly. So if you have time, sort of set it aside. Come back to it later and then proof it.

Okay, here’s another tip for you. The more important the message the more carefully you need to proofread. Now I like to say make at least three passes through that particular message. First, check for misspellings, grammar errors and punctuation mistakes. Now everyone says okay, well, I ran Spellcheck on it, all right. Spellcheck is fine. I certainly encourage people to do it, but that alone is not going to prevent all your errors because if the word is spelled properly but it’s the wrong word, it’s not going to show up in your Spellcheck, okay? So be very careful. We have their, T-H-E-I-R and there, T-H-E-R-E, all right. So if you use the wrong word, it’s

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spelled correctly but it’s the wrong word, and it’s not going to show up in Spellcheck.

Colleen WunderlichAnd you know also too, it’s easy when you’re spellchecking to just click on the suggested change with the Spellcheck. You know how it finds a misspelled word.

Larry MuffetYes.

Colleen WunderlichAnd it suggests a change. Well, it’s easy to just click okay on all those changes and I had a situation where I did that, and luckily I read it through and the word that the Spellcheck picked, I won’t say it on air here.

Larry Muffet[laughs]

Colleen WunderlichBut it was not –

Larry MuffetNot appropriate?

Colleen WunderlichNo, [laughs] it was not an appropriate word for any professional communication, and I thought oh, my gosh, if I would have just sent that, I don’t know what could have

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happened. You know it would have been really embarrassing at the minimum

Larry MuffetYeah, Autocorrect on –

Colleen WunderlichOr would have some consequences.

Larry MuffetTwitter and some of those things or instant messaging, that Autocorrect get can you in trouble, too. I want to caution people that use voice technology to compose their message. Be very careful with that because that can be a little bit iffy on making mistakes because English being English, you know where a lot of words sound the same and that sort of thing, be very careful making sure to check that. It’s not to say that you can’t use it. Be very careful checking over that if you do use that technology. Okay, so the first pass is to look for misspellings, grammar errors and punctuation mistakes. Second pass through the message, you want to check for missing elements of the message. Is the information arranged in the most effective way? Am I missing some fact here? Did I leave something out? So that’s your second check-through.

Your third check-through, read the message aloud to see how it sounds because a lot of times when you read something out loud, you can start to say well, I did – this wasn’t really clear. That sentence is a little complicated. So reading it aloud is very good way of proofreading.

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Okay, revise as necessary and then finally, review the formatting, making sure you got margins and you got decent size and type of font. All right, so you want to keep your layout simple and clean. White background, black text for most situations is pretty [inaudible 0:39:55], okay. You want to use easily readable font in an easily readable size. So again, know your target audience or know your target receiver.

If somebody has low vision, bump up the font size, okay, as a favor to them, and it’s not going to cause any problems with people that don’t have low vision. If you run – here at Hadley, we generally don’t send out any emails with anything lower than a 14.5, and if I notice I’m sending it to somebody with a low vision, I’m going to probably be using 18 or 20.5, okay?

Colleen WunderlichWell, it’s just a matter of being considerate to the recipient, and even for those of us who use screen readers, I always appreciate when someone sends me a link, that they put the link on its own line so that I can just copy you know, select and copy and paste it into my browser and then I don’t have to worry are there any other words or punctuation attached to that link. So that’s just another form of courtesy to the other person and also I think one that I know I can speak for myself, those of us who are blind, sometimes can have difficulty with is if we copy and paste information from other sources, the font might be different.

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So I know often now when I send emails, I have – there’s a way through JAWS that you can check if there are any inconsistencies in your email, and I even sometimes go through the font change and just make sure that I select it all and put my font, set my font so that I know that if I copied anything, I know it’s all coming across in the same font because sometimes it is difficult for us to tell, and I know for those of us who can’t see, we don’t even know, we don’t even most of the time don’t care, as long as it reads fine, but I think for those of you who are sighted, it can be a little distracting, right? I mean what is it like for you when you get an email has different fonts and different – I don’t know?

Larry MuffetYeah, it’s not ideal. It’s distracting and yeah, it’s not the ideal situation. So those are excellent points. One thing I would caution people, before you hit that send button, always, always, always – we’re going to talk about this whole putting the addresses in a bunch of times today but before you hit the send button, I personally recommend don’t fill in the address line until the very last thing in the composition once you’re already done, and you’ve already done all your proofreading and revision and read it out loud and stuff, then put who’s going to get this particular email in it but when you put in the addresses, you want to include everyone that’s necessary and not one person more. Don’t add a bunch of people on this thing because again, we want to avoid sending unnecessary emails to people because all that does is irritate them, okay.

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Now Allison’s point is well-taken. Do not hit “reply all” when you really mean reply. This can have effects ranging from embarrassing to actually devastating in the wrong situations, particularly when you’re using BCC’s and other things that you can let people know that you are sending something to somebody without – behind their back. So this whole “reply all” thing has all kinds of different consequences. Be very careful when you use that. Another thing, don’t mark messages “urgent” unless they really are urgent. Again, you know just as a courtesy to people. Avoid sending unnecessary attachments and use this “return receipt requested” feature sparingly. Only use it for the most critical messages because I can tell you that most people, when they get that sort of thing, take a little bit of offense to it. It’s like an invasion of privacy. What? Do you think I’m not going to read the email, or are you trying to check up on me or what exactly that is? So be very you know you use sparingly.

Colleen WunderlichYeah, I always feel like people are trying to check up on me when they do that to me. Like did you really read my email, or now that I’ve given them the written receipt, I feel like I’m on a time clock to respond to them.

Larry MuffetAbsolutely.

Colleen WunderlichAnd that’s really invasive on the weekend because maybe I’m just looking through my email to see what’s there and I

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have no intention of responding to anyone over the weekend, and now I’m forced to respond and I know some people will do that as a power play but I think it’s really inconsiderate to the recipient.

Larry MuffetYeah, I’m not a big fan of that and frankly, never use it, unless of course I’m dealing with somebody that has a tendency never to read my emails and in which case, maybe that’s a discussion for another time.

Colleen WunderlichWell, if you do have a time sensitive document, like if you’re maybe sending something into someone by a deadline, and you absolutely have to make sure that they got it to cover yourself. Maybe it’s a grant proposal. Maybe it’s a paper that’s due and you really – like you talked earlier about covering yourself with a trail. You might do something like that, but again, that takes into account because you’re accountable for something.

Larry MuffetCorrect. Yeah, good point. So at this point, we’ve talked about the Three-Step Writing Process. I want to break down an email into all its component parts and sort of talk about best practices and how to use those parts. All right, first of all, the address line. First thing you want to consider is your own email address. So I would ask you a philosophical question. If you’re a business person and you’re getting an email from toosexy99@hotmail.com and you’re getting another one jdwilliams@acmecorp.org,

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which one are you more likely to open, okay? The point being is this, not – it’s fine to have an edgy email address. It’s fine to do that when you’re conversing with your friends but if you want to use that sort of email address, I suggest having two email addresses. One you use for professional purposes and one you use for personal purposes, all right? Again, we’re going to – oh, go ahead, Colleen.

Colleen WunderlichWell, I mean I don’t even – if I get an email from someone with that kind of email address, I won’t even open it because –

Larry MuffetOh, exactly.

Colleen WunderlichI don’t know it has a virus in it or if it’s spam. It’s just a big waste of time to me.

Larry MuffetExactly. So again –

Colleen WunderlichI mean seriously.

Larry MuffetIf you want to be taken seriously, have a professional email address and then if you want to have an edgy one to

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send to your friends, by all means but keep the two separate. So here’s a useful sort of life hack for you. When you’re composing an email, generally what’s the first thing you do? You start off at the top and you put in the addressee. My suggestion to you is, when you’re composing an email address, that should be the very last step, okay? It should be the last step. So hit the subject line. Compose the body. Make sure you have a signature block and all that stuff. Proof it. Do what you got to do. Then and only then, go in and put the addresses in and hit the send button. So again, when you’re composing the email address, add the recipient address or addresses last. It just avoids you sending something that’s incomplete or you hadn’t thought through well or whatever.

Okay, be careful using the carbon copy, the CC line and the BCC line which is like blind carbon copy or blind courtesy copy. BCC’s can be perceived as talking behind somebody’s back. Basically, it means they’re not going to – the person – you can send it to somebody without the other people who got the email knowing that you sent it to that particular person. It can be very useful in a situation that’s a legitimate thing when you’ve got a group of people that don’t know each other and you’re not sure that they want their email exposed to another person, then you can BCC people and you’re not sharing their email address with other people.

However if you’re using it from the standpoint to think you’re being sneaky or you sneak around behind somebody’s back or like look what I sent to this person ha

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ha ha type a thing, those things can blow up on you because as we all know, people aren’t really good – so good at keeping secrets and again, this is another situation where “reply all” can come back and bite you, where everyone suddenly is replying to everybody, and that email address now is out there and it’s like wait, you sent that to him? You didn’t tell me you were sending that to him. So be very careful with the whole BCC thing.

Now if you take nothing else away from today’s email seminar, take this away. Not including a subject line is one of the biggest mistakes you can possibly make on an email. The subject line is like a newspaper headline and it’s going to have a big determination on whether your email message is read at all and the response to it. Here’s a suggestion to you. My tip is this should be the first line that you write. When you compose an email, write the subject line first. It sort of sets the tone for the rest of the message and keeps you on point, okay? The deal is this. People just get hundreds, some people get hundreds, some people get several hundred emails every day and people are looking for any way possible to deal with them quickly and easily.

So having no subject line just makes you a real likely candidate for being thrown in the garbage can, okay? If the person does open it, they’re probably going to be irritated that they had to open this to find out what it was about, and then if they didn’t care about that particular thing again, they’re probably going to delete you and put you on the junk mail list, okay?

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Another thing I would suggest is overly cute message lines will get your message passed over, something like “bet you’re wondering what’s happening tomorrow” is not as good as “meeting tentatively scheduled for Thursday, June 25th”, okay? Subject line, keep them short, 45 characters or less. That’s plenty of characters. Be as specific as possible. Stay away from “hi”. Stay away from FYI because those things are vague and they don’t convey any importance that your message is important. If your message is time sensitive, feel free to include the date in the subject line, something like next meeting on July 15th and here’s the killer. Avoid using all capital letters and more than one exclamation mark in the subject line. Using all capital letters seems like you’re shouting. More than one exclamation mark seems bossy, okay?

We get down to the body of the message itself. Here’s some pointers for you. First off, always use some sort of greeting, hi, Larry; hello, Larry; dear, Larry, something like that. Always use some sort of greeting. Don’t just dive in and start with your text. If you’re in doubt about how to address that person, use something formal to avoid possibly offending them. You can pretty much never go wrong with taking a more formal approach, but you can periodically offend people if you’re too informal. If you’re writing to a diverse group, use something generic and polite like “dear, members of the selection committee”.

Here’s another thing – key I want you to take away today. Keep the body, main body short. You want to keep your

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email messages to no more than 150 words if there’s any way possible, so no more than 150 words in an email. Strive for brevity and clarity and again, remember that direct versus indirect approach. Bullet points, using bullet points is really good because a lot of people get hundreds of emails and they’re looking for ways to skim through the information quickly. Bullet points are a great way to do that, to set that up for them and bullet points frankly are easy to read. It’s often useful to provide context. Remember Colleen was talking about the whole idea of an email thread and you have to go through it? Well, if there was a question that you’re responding to, you can just simply cut and paste that question out of somebody else’s email. Paste it into your email and then answer the question. So it provides some context for that particular person who’s reading it.

Use separate paragraphs for separate thoughts. If you’ve got a lot of too many unrelated points, then you maybe ought to consider sending more than one email, okay? Be sure to clearly state the desired outcome at the end of your message. If you’re requesting a response, spell out the response you require. If there’s a due date involved, clearly state it. So we want to make that people know exactly what the desired outcome or the action or the response that you’re seeking, okay? Finally, always use a closing, something brief and friendly, thanks, best wishes, see you tomorrow. If it’s a formal message, sincerely, respectively yours, always include your name.

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Another thing I suggest to people is that’s just going to save you a lot of time, it’s always a good practice to use contact information like your name, address, phone, email, if you have a page on LinkedIn, whatever. Make yourself a signature block to save time. You can make yourself a signature block in Outlook, and then you don’t have to type this every single time. It’ll just plug it in at the end of the email and you’re good to go, okay? Go through your completion checking, reading out loud the recipient address and then hit send and that’s the last points on Using Email Effectively.

Failing to use email effectively can frustrate both you the sender and the receiver of the message. So use these tips to make time and headaches. Number one, the three-step writing process. Plan your message first. Then write your message and then third, complete the message by properly proofreading it and revising it. Determine the purpose of the message and analyze your audience. Write clearly and concisely. Proofread carefully and check your content and format before sending. Number two, always use the subject line and use it carefully to increase the probability of your message being read. Number three, use an appropriate opening. Number four, strive for clarity and brevity in the body of your message, 150 words or less. Bullet point your supporting information. Use separate paragraphs for separate thoughts.

Five, spell out your desired outcome and response and/or due date. Six, use a closing and include a signature block of your contact information. If you incorporate these tips

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and techniques into your daily routine, you’ll be – truly be using email more effectively and that’s it. Thanks and let’s open it up for questions.

Colleen WunderlichOkay, sounds good. I think you’ve offered some really great tips, very practical and really could be applied, not just in business but even in one’s personal life, you know just really, really raising the profile of email.

Larry MuffetMary has a question. She said I send thank you letters to our guest speakers. Do I send a signature or I just print my name? I think in an email, it’s perfectly acceptable for you just to print your name, type it out there. I mean it is possible to have – make yourself a little file with your handwritten signature, and I suppose if I was sending thank you letters for a fundraising gift, that type of thing, I might go that direction but I think the type of thank you letters that you’re with, you’re not going to offend anybody, as long as you just type out your name. So a name’s probably effective in that way.

Marvin says I was told that some salutation can cause email to be spammed. True or false? I guess it would depend on the salutation, but if I use, dear so and so, dear and their first name or dear Mr. or Mrs. so and so, I think I’m pretty safe on that regard. I don’t really see how that would kick off a spam filter but if I said hey, Jack or something that, that – I could see where that would be a problem. Let’s see if we have any other questions. Mary

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also wants to know how do I make a signature? If you go in to your – or if you’re talking about having a cursive signature, you can do that by basically scanning in your signature and making yourself a little JPEG file of your scanned in signature, and then you just paste that in above your name.

If you’re talking about a signature block, you go into email. At the end of your email, you right click and there’s this thing where you can create a signature file, and you can go in there and put your name and your address and all your contact information and in fact, most of the people at Hadley throw in a little quote from somebody, Albert Einstein or Helen Keller or whatever, which is a nice touch I think, too. It sort of personalizes your message. So other questions.

Mylie has a question. Would you please comment on email that says personal or confidential in the subject line? First of all, I’d be a little leery of that because in the way I think about it, I don’t really want to send truly personal or confidential stuff in an email. I want to do that face to face or maybe in something that’s more secure because I don’t really feel like email communication is particularly secure. So if I get something like that, I’m very leery of it. I never send out that – something with that sort of subject line, and if I get something from that, I’m really leery about it because that just to me, it sort of flashes scam to me because most people don’t send that type of personal information.

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One of the ways that people get scammed is, they’ll get an email from what is supposed to be the IRS. Well, here’s a tip for you. The IRS never sends email, okay? You’ll always get like return or see requested snail mail from the IRS. So that’s the type of thing where that personal or confidential frankly scares me a little bit. Other questions.

CallerOh, yeah, you mentioned the right click for the signature. Is that only in JAWS or is that applicable to other screen writers as well? Because I use [inaudible 0:57:24].

Larry MuffetColleen, you got any thoughts on that? Because I’m just talking about right clicking your mouse in Outlook. So I’m not sure how the JAWS command for that would be to create a signature block.

Colleen WunderlichI do it through the menus. So I would use my Alt key and get to the menu that I needed and arrow through the menus or tab, whatever seems to make the most sense. I think with JAWS, when in doubt when you don’t know the key stroke, you know you always have the menus and that’s what I would do.

Larry MuffetOther questions? We got time for a couple more.

Caller

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My name is Shawn from [inaudible 0:57:58], Nova Scotia. If I’m using “sending forward”, would it best to turn my “confirmation of receipt” off?

Larry MuffetI guess you got to judge the situation. If it’s something as we talked about, that you know it’s a very important document or a very important situation like time sensitive document, then I might leave that particular thing on because I want some sort of confirmation that I can prove that I you know, that I submitted it by a certain time but in most situations, I’d turn it off. And for one more question. All right, then I think we’ll start wrapping up.

Colleen WunderlichOkay, well, Larry, I really want to thank you today for putting this together. I know you’ve put a lot of time into this presentation, and it’s something that we’ve been talking about doing for a while. So thank you for bringing that to fruition for us.

Larry MuffetWell, you’re very welcome. It was kind of a labor of love. It’s something that I just taught a class on that not that long ago. So it was an opportunity to sort of spread the gospel, and I think everyone, if they take some of these things to heart, will probably be more effective in their email communications.

Colleen WunderlichI think so. Okay, are we ready to wrap things up?

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Larry MuffetAbsolutely.

Colleen WunderlichOkay, so this seminar, like all of our seminars, will be archived on our website, and it’ll be available to you for your use anytime around the world and around the clock. Each Hadley seminar is now made available on a podcast where you can download to your computer or your mobile device. So if you missed today’s seminar, you can certainly, or part of today’s seminar, you can certainly take advantage of that, and we encourage you to share it with your friends if you think it would be useful to them.

If today’s seminar has your interest in this or related topics, you can also check out the Seminars @ Hadley archives and Hadley’s course list, too. We have a course in Business Communication and we have one in Business Writing. Remember, we said that email writing in business really should be treated just like business writing or formal business letter. So business communications and business writing would be classes I think would be very useful to you if you want to delve more deeply into this topic. So we both thank you today for your participation and all your questions were outstanding and your contributions to this discussion. It always helps us to make the discussion more lively when we have live interaction. We really appreciate that. If people have suggestions, they can send it to feedback@hadley.edu. Any closing comments that you want to make, Larry?

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Larry MuffetNo, I just again thank people for taking the time to be here today, great questions. It showed that you were attentive and it’s something again, I enjoyed being here today and it was kind of a kick for me to be on the other side of the microphone if you will. So – and I want to thank Colleen for being such an awesome moderator and really sort of help me along and asking great questions, and she added a lot to the seminar, too.

Colleen WunderlichWell, thank you and thank you for asking me to host for you. I appreciate it. I’m honored. Usually he’s our seminar guru around here. You probably figured that out right now because he’s always on, right? [laughs] Yeah.

Larry MuffetAbout two-thirds of the time, yeah.

Colleen WunderlichRight, exactly. So thank you, everybody for joining us.

Larry MuffetGoodbye for now and we’ll see you again soon.

Colleen WunderlichThank you.

Larry MuffetThanks.

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