Email Context

In a conversation, there is some shared context -- it can be the same physical location as when talking in person, or the commonality of time when speaking on a telephone. Even when there is paper documentation there is some shared context that is embedded within the medium -- a note on a birthday card, the contents of a talk at a conference, a term paper that is given to your professor with a batch of other term papers, or something similar.

With email, you can't assume anything about the correspondent's location, time, frame of mind, mood, health, marital status, affluence, age, or gender. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your reader some context.

Creating effective Subject Lines.

The subject line is an integral part of any email. It clearly identify what will follow.

The subject line should pertain clearly to the email body. This lets the person who receives the mail know the context of your message before they read it. It should be brief and does not need to be a complete sentence. (Many mailers will truncate long subject lines).

If you are responding to email, your mailer should preface the previous subject line with "Re:" or "RE:" (for REgarding). If your mail program doesn't do this, it would be polite to put in the "RE:" by hand.

If you are offering non-urgent information that requires no response from the other person, consider prefacing the subject line with "FYI:" (For Your Information), as in:

    Subject: FYI: Copy of final report

Specifying urgent messages.

Time-critical messages, prefaced with "URGENT:" is a good idea (especially if you know the person gets a lot of email):

    Subject: URGENT: Reports due this week

Requesting information

For requests, prefacing the subject with "REQ:" is beneficial:

    Subject: REQ: current budget estimate

Eliminate the word ‘information’

Suggestion -- consider eliminating the word "information" from your subject lines, and maybe from the body of your message as well. I often receive email that looks like this:

    Subject: information Please send me info about your writings

This gives me very little clue as to what the person wants to know about: my books? which book? my training courses? which course? Am I supposed to send paper documents or give URLs? The only thing I could do with email like this was ask for further context. Mail like this would have been much better as:

    Subject: REQ: any Web pages with books about databases?
 Quoting Documents

Refering to previous mail.

When referring to previous email, you should explicitly quote that document to provide context.

For instance, instead of sending an email that simply says:

   yes, thanks.

Say:

> Are you going to have the sales report done by Tuesday?

Yes

Quoting another person's words.

The greater than sign ( > ) has become the relatively standard convention for quoting someone else's words.

The problem ...

Imagine getting a response like this on Friday to some email that you think you probably sent on Tuesday:

        I talked with Jim the other day, and he said that he needs to
        see the other one before he can decide.

(Huh???) You'd probably be much happier with:

> I’ve forwarded the report on the prospectus I received, > based on price/performance, I'm ready to go when you are. > Have you talked to Jim about whether he wants to but this > stock or the one being reviewed by Jane? > Does he want to wait until the price drops

I talked to Jim about it the other day, and he still hasn’t seen the review by Jane. After reviewing it, he will make up his mind.

This is substantially better, but now errs on the side of too much context. You shouldn't have to wade through gobs of extraneous stuff to get to the meat of the message. You should include just enough to provide a context for the message and no more.

As a rule of thumb, remember that at least half of the lines in an email message should be your own. If you must include the whole message that you are replying to, include it after your response.

You would probably be even more pleased with:

> Have you talked to Jim

I talked to Jim about it on Thursday, and he says that he will need a few more days to work on the project before reaching a decision.

Note that here there is the right amount of context, and the answer is very clear and specific. A good rule of thumb is to look very carefully at all pronouns in your first three sentences. If they don't refer to something explicitly stated in the email, change them to something concrete.

If the sentence is in the middle of a paragraph, or wraps around lines, go ahead and remove everything but the part that you were really interested in, inserting "[...]" if you have to take something out in the middle. If you need to substitute a value for a pronoun, go ahead but put the value in square brackets:

      > [Jim] wants to evaluate the options.

      Jane’s report should be on my desk by this afternoon (Friday).
      I'll forward it to Jim the minute it hits my desk.

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