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Better English 101
Timely Communications Tips
December 19, 2008 Issue 26
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In This Issue
-- PLEASE PUT IN A SUBJECT IN YOUR EMAILS

I will spend the last weeks of this year sending you messages about errors and bad habits that have bothered me the most throughout 2008.

You may have seen these complaints before. But writers don't seem to be reading my newsletters.

Please help by passing them on.

PLEASE PUT IN A SUBJECT IN YOUR EMAILS
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 Two emails from authors (who else?) last week reminded me of this practice.

One author sent about 12 messages within a week. Each presented a concern that requested my response. But the subject in each email was the same: his first name. Or sometimes the subject would be RE.

But I had to respond to his emails where the subject could have been presented (but wasn't) as "postcards," or "when is delivery?" or "please change the list."

When emails come in by the tens and hundreds, we need to get a quick sense of what the matter is. We open some emails because they are frankly more important than others.

But how do we know that an email relates to a matter we need to respond to quickly when the subject is RE?

We don't know. And how do we find the email where he first brought up movie rights? So we have to spend extra time reading yet another email that has a subject of RE or Hello because the sender is too lazy to think of us, the recipient. All the sender wants to do is get the email out of his way.

It's bad communicating. We could learn from the marketing copywriters about this practice. They focus on benefits because they know that the reader is interested in the answer to only one question: What's in it for me?

We could also learn from the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. She told me that her students were confused when she told them that poems written by them had to have a subject. "What the heck are your poeting about? [my words, not hers]" But they got the message eventually.

Sincerely,
Barry Beckham


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