Poorly composed or long-winded emails not only do a bad job of getting their message across, they also waste people’s time.
You already knew email was a big waste of time. Even if your email gateway spanks spam and vanquishes viruses and keeps them out of your inbox, you still have to deal with the ones that arrive. That’s where the time goes.
A new study contends that the big problem with email are the messages written so poorly that they create extra work just to understand them. The study from IMI finds several common threads in play when it comes to bad email:
• Email isn’t clear on the action the recipient is to take
• Disorganized content
• Critical information is either missing or buried in the message
• The author is a long-winded tedious moron who uses a hundred words when only a few would be far more appropriate to the particular intent of the message they’ve composed, prone to extending a simple description or request into a lengthy diatribe that seems as though it just won’t end, because the author wouldn’t know brevity if it walked up to him and hit him with a hammer…ow…well, you get the idea.
And email has become important to business users; the study notes how 80 percent of its 600 participants considered email writing skills “extremely” or “very” important. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents spent from one to three hours reading email, and a similar amount of time writing email each day.
A third of those surveyed felt they wasted between 30 and 60 minutes per day reading poorly-written email. “Email writing is a critical competency for today’s business professionals, but too few email messages are organized clearly or effectively,” said Deborah Kenny, IMI’s Vice President and General Manager of Learning Solutions, in the study.
This holiday season, this author recommends giving a gift to those less-effective email writers. ‘Elements of Style’ by Strunk and White is a slim 105 pages of English communication goodness. Someone in your inbox probably needs a copy.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
