Do You Have the Write Stuff to Succeed?

You get to work early. The plan is to spend a couple of hours catching up on email before the phones start ringing and meetings begin. You open Outlook - and you see 375 new emails on top of about 3,000 sort-of-read messages already languishing in your inbox. Where to start?

You begin filing and deleting, dashing off quick notes, when you notice a response from your boss, Helen "Ironpants" Quibble, to an urgent email you sent yesterday responding to an email from her boss Tom Slammit (i.e. your boss's boss, or capo del mio capo).

Ironpants wants to know (in a rather whiny tone), "Where are we with the Unimax deal?"

The Unimax deal: your fiscal Holy Grail. It all started when Slammit casually tossed out the idea at a meeting last November, when business was just beginning to heat up for the first time in years. "We should develop a partnership with Unimax," he mused.

That little remark led to mountains of work -- phone calls, research, emails, meetings -- as you threw everything into making Unimax happen. It became your obsession. Sometimes you wondered if Slammit even remembered making the remark. But that doesn't matter now -- it is your quest, until you either succeed or die trying.

And because you care so deeply about the potential of the Unimax deal -- because you know it better than anyone else -- you are a little bit, shall we say, territorial. This is your baby.

Unfortunately, the deal also became an obsession for Ironpants. So when you read her email asking where you are in that tone, you think, "What an idiot. Can't she read? I explained everything in my email."

Can't they read? That is a question we often ask ourselves. We send emails, many of them carefully composed -- admittedly sometimes composed on smart phones, with our aching thumbs, in bathrooms at dinner parties. But the point is, you send email, and the recipients send back dumb replies that prove they didn't bother to read what you wrote!

We think written communications are clearer than the spoken word; they're more precise, a record that people can refer to again for clarity and to refresh overtaxed minds. All that may be true-but this isn't how it works in the real world. Writing (in letters, emails, memos, presentations) presents its own challenges for clear communications.

There are no hand gestures in writing; there are no facial expressions to read. Tone of voice, which comes so naturally to us when we speak, must be crafted in written form. And frankly, emoticons should be used sparingly, if at all, in the business world.

Sorry about that ;-}~

It's easy to make dumb mistakes with email, too. Remember the time you sent a very private message to that new, cute co-worker as an "all-users" email? Boy was your face red -- for days. Or when you forwarded a whole email chain (including a private side conversation you promptly forgot about) rather than just sending the latest, most relevant part?

Once we realize that a lot of human face-to-face subtext doesn't make it into our email communications, it will be easier to read apparently demanding, huffy, clueless, or repetitive notes and respond to them with well-crafted, non-judgmental writing of our own. There are some tricks and best practices, and we will do our best to share them all with you in this blog.

You just have to promise not to tell "Ironpants."

By the way, here's our first tip: Don't bury the lead (like we just did here).