Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less. Like a cinquain. Ideally, it would be a 160 character count like an SMS message, but since that would require an actual e-mail plug-in (viz. “work”), we’ll go with the much-easier-to-count concept of sentences instead.
Mike Davidson, A Low-Fi Solution to E-Mail Overload: Sentenc.es
[via Daring Fireball]
I’ve been having this issue at work. I’ve got two new Windows Systems Engineers working with me, and I’m trying to break both of their habbit of sending 1,000-word essays by giving them gentle grief about it at every opportunity. On the flip side, I strive to make every email that I send as concise as possible — five sentences would be a long email for me — and I’ve taken some flak for being “terse.”
Is there a happy medium?
I don’t know, but I’ll take terse over superfluous any day. The goal of any email is to be read and understood, and in my experience, the odds of success are inversely proportional to word count.
