Posts Tagged ‘Email’

The other day I read a post on Lifehacker about revising emails, the main point of it was to revise the email more and more, the more people you send it to. They quoted David Silverman from Harvard:

1 to 5 recipients = 2 to 4 revisions
5 to 10 recipients = 8 to 12 revisions
Company-wide or to Executive Committee = 30 to 50 revisions

Do you think such revision is needed? Maybe I take the wrong approach, but in 95% of my emails I don’t really care in the sense that it’s not my problem if people don’t read my emails. I’m all for revising emails, but sending an email to 20 people and doing 20 revisions? Come on!

Generally speaking I would say you should revise your email once, to make sure you didn’t make any factual mistakes. If you’re sending to a wide audience, maybe you could revise once more to make sure everything is clear, but noone really cares about the odd spelling mistake, or anything like that. I mostly email my clients with project updates and such, they care about the project status, not the correct placement of commas. They are perfectly happy with a completely garbled email, as long as I do what I need to.

Obviously there are scenarios where careful wording and extreme revision is needed (job offers, investment opportunities, etc), but I think in the day to day email business there is no need to be so meticulous. Yes, you will make some mistakes, but you won’t spend all day revising your simple email.