Stay Under 5 Sentences, and Other Rules for Great Emailing
What’s rude in a letter is right for an inbox
There’s a golden rule of email etiquette: Everything you do should be in service of reducing the burden of email on your recipient. Concision and clarity are your guiding principles.
In this respect, emails diverge significantly from traditional letter writing. If you’ve ever written a snail-mail letter, you know that the chattiness is the point: You would usually expect to open with some small talk, ask after your correspondent’s health, thank them for their previous letter, and so on. In this context, launching straight into whatever you want from that person would be considered rather abrupt.
Email turns that protocol on its head. When you’re writing an email, it’s perfectly fine — indeed preferable — to get straight to it. Far from being impolite, brevity in email shows a respect for your reader’s time.
If you’re emailing in a business context, you are probably doing so out of necessity, not nicety; you don’t need to try to disguise that fact with generic pleasantries, which will likely only come off as inauthentic anyway. Unless you have a genuine reason to be concerned about your recipient’s well-being, there is no need to start your message with, “How are you?”
