Originally published May 2020. Updated September 2024. Why should you care about effective business emails? Because they save time, both for you and for the people you email. How do they save time? Because you write fewer emails when you are better at it. When you’re a competent and considerate writer of emails, you cut down on the unnecessary back-and-forth email traffic and the clutter in your inbox. And your reward? You get back time. Better emails = better brand + time saved In my last post on business email writing, I talked...
Originally written April 2020. Updated September 2024. Writing emails at work is something we do on automatic pilot but shouldn’t, because how you email matters. Would you show up for work in rumpled pajamas and bed hair? Would you slouch in your chair scrolling through your Instagram feed on your phone while in a one-on-one meeting with your boss? No and no, because you know your appearance and body language are a reflection of your professionalism (and brand) in the workplace. But do you realize the same is true of the emails you...
Numbers, what…what is this doing here??? This is a blog on writing! Yes, it is a blog on writing, but it is more so a blog on writing well, and that means being clear and concise so you can easily communicate your message when you’re writing with numbers. To be honest, it’s easy to get numbers wrong, and when that happens, our writing and therefore our message is affected. So let’s take a look at some rules for using numbers, plus some ways to make sure our writing is always clear, no matter how many numbers we are using....
Last time, I showed you an example of word puking from a restaurant website. It was a whole lot of fancy words that said essentially nothing that would help the reader understand what kind of food or experience they could expect. This time we have a run-on sentence—71 words—that does say something, but the reader gets lost in it because it is so darn long and confusing. Here’s the sentence, with brand names removed: The auto industry has paid lip service to digital sales for years, but with the growth of ABC’s direct sales model and...
Originally published June 2020, Updated September 2024 With the pandemic and people working from home, we’ve all heard about the empty highways and lack of traffic. At my house, I have probably heard more about it than most because my husband was commuting each day—and enjoying the easy drive. (He works in aircraft maintenance, so WFH was not an option.) As our stay-at-home order ends and people hit the road once more, my husband’s commute is clogging up again, and that got me thinking about paragraphs. Yes, paragraphs. When...
