Drafting an Email: Best Practices (or Better, anyway)

I read the blog post The Well-Structured Email over at Dan Brown's greenonions.com a couple of weeks ago, and I wanted to share his great tips with my readers. Dan's opening recommendation, "don't send business colleagues a wall of prose," is dead on. Sometimes you have to send your clients, opposing counsel, or others a lot of information, but there are ways to do it to get faster responses and be more efficient about your email writing.

Some of the suggestions Dan makes include:

- Use headers to delineate sections
- Start with the action item
- Include the deadline (you're all already doing this, right?)
- Make a recommendation - you shorten the conversation and the email chain
- Summarize the message - for longer emails
- Use bullets for sub-topics
- Anticipate needed information - again, to short-circuit the seemingly endless chain of messages

Some great email usage tips here - read it!

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