by Sharon Ernst | Dec 22, 2021 | Business Email Writing
(Originally published November 2017) Do you wish writing didn’t take you so long? Or that you could dash off an email without having to think so hard about it, and labor over it? We spend so much time on business email writing, it’s no surprise it’s a pain point. And if it is a pain point for you, kudos to you for caring! Far too many emails are dashed off with little thought for how well they’re communicating what’s intended. Sadly, that leads to even more time spent writing and reading as we’re trying to understand each other, so...
by Sharon Ernst | Oct 26, 2020 | Business Email Writing, Business Writing Skills
What’s scarier than Halloween haunts? Sucky workplace writing! Halloween is here, but you know what’s really scary? The billions of dollars lost each year due to sucky workplace writing. How many billions? How scary can this really be? Oh, it’s terrifying, trust me: $400 billion. Every. Single. Year. If that number doesn’t scare you, it should. Picture 400 billion one-dollar bills piled up high and set on fire…a huge bonfire of money going up in smoke, leaving only a dusting of ashes behind. That’s $400 billion gone, just gone. Can...
by Sharon Ernst | Nov 10, 2018 | Business Email Writing
It’s a Friday afternoon as I write this, and the long work week is winding down. That means I’m reflecting on the past few days—and realizing that twice this week my time was wasted by bad business email writing. Twice this week I received unclear emails and I had to spend time trying to understand the instructions and timelines and attachments, write emails in reply to get clarification, and put tasks on hold as I waited for the answers. It all added up to about an hour of my time. You might think, “Well, an hour isn’t much time,...