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#its time to stop the flowery language in emails
disapprovinghmm · 3 years
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Listening to my mom craft a professional email is like being inside my own head when crafting any response to anything ever it's nice to see where I got it from
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cherry3point14 · 4 years
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Stranger Than Fanfiction: Ch 3
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Series Masterlist
Pairing: Dean x Reader Warnings: Meta baby. Pure meta. Word count: 2,100. Chapter Summary: Your google search turns up something unexpected. A/N: No author in this one for... reasons. Also this one is kind of short and lame. A means to an end if you will, but trust me, Ch 4 is a doozy. P.S it’s nearly 3am so Chapter 4 will be up when I wake up, ya dig.
Ao3 if you prefer
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It’s almost funny how dramatic the voice in your head wants to be about those suited criminals and yet it doesn’t care to elaborate on anything important. Like, say, your imminent death. The mention of it was so casual, calm, but a couple of weirdos want to pretend to be insurance adjusters and suddenly it’s all pretty prose and run-on sentences. Flowery language about broad-shouldered men in roaring muscle cars that are going to change your life. She’d kept going while you’d interviewed Maggie Hall. She’d harped on and on about how you couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Of course, you couldn’t stop thinking about them, she wouldn’t shut up about them.
After an entire monologue about the way the paper felt in your hands and could never be replaced by computers—purists are the worst—you finally get to leave. That's when you get some respite. You’re walking out into the late afternoon sun and thanking Maggie for her time and it's bliss. Maggie's story sounds a little off, after years doing this you have this gut instinct for when you should investigate further. Funnily enough, you have drama in your life that you’ll submit a valid claim anyway. Just so you can get this cursed case out of your hair. You might even hurry it through the system before the thing has the chance to kill you.
You’re still not sure how a case could kill you. You’re a pencil pusher at best and the interview with Maggie is an excellent example of the majority of your fieldwork, obviously excluding the criminals at the start. Unless your demise is death by papercut.
For now, you’ve given up trying to fathom out the voice you’re hearing, especially since she's chosen to once again go radio silent. If she won’t say anything useful, like say how not to die, then you were going to have to figure out how to skip ahead on your own. Since she kept talking about the imposters you’d met that day, they seemed to be an excellent place to start.
CNK 80Q3. Ohio plates. That's as much as you know without google.
That evening you set yourself up in the same way you would to work from home. There's a desk in the corner of your dining room with a chair that offers enough lumbar support for the longest of research sessions. Although it’s your personal laptop and there’s not normally a large glass of wine sitting next to you when work.
After it powers on you’re assaulted by the usual pop-ups; windows you forgot to close last time and your emails. Procrastinating is not a new routine, and you’re on a mission, so they all get minimized instead of closed completely. Then you open a new browser window and a stark google homepage stares back at you. A hopeful new beginning.
CNK 80Q3. You’re genuinely surprised that she hasn’t started talking again to describe the change in the air as you type in the plate number. Or some drivel about the way your fingers emphasize each letter and number. It’s all there happening anyway, making the moment foreboding, but your narrator doesn’t seem care.
The first row of results are images. Weirdly its images of the license plate itself. That doesn't strike you as odd at first glance and then you think about it a little more. Why are there so many pictures of this particular license plate? Who is running around taking these pictures? You're pretty sure if you typed in your own plate number there would be no pictures of it. And then you see some shopping results where you can actually buy the plate. While the online shops might explain the images, it only really poses more questions. Why are so many people buying that license plate? What’s so special about it?
You take a sip of your wine before you scroll further, savoring the taste as well as the way it relaxes your shoulders. You don't own any 'fun' novelty coasters that say it but you're inclined to agree with the statement you've heard before. Wine really does make everything better.
You’re not yet into the murky depths of page 2 but you’re far enough down the page now to make it past the sponsored results. These links come thick and fast from websites that all seem to have one word in common. Supernatural.
Then you see your salvation. A page called Supernaturalwiki—the link is simply titled: Impala—and you stop scrolling, a grateful sound slipping past your lips as you do. Wiki, you know that word. Like Wikipedia. Wikipedia has references and moderators', clear and concise explanations. This was the easy way out you were looking for.
That’s what you hope as you click on the link anyway. Your naivety lasts all of twenty seconds before the page loads. With its stock image of a 1967 Chevrolet Impala, and a quote about it being the most important object in the universe.
Or it's the most important object in some books at least.
Further clicking and longer sips of wine reveal it’s a series of books called Supernatural—with the title of the wiki you should have seen that coming. These were story after story of ghosts and demons and angels? There are pages that describe monsters, urban legends, and two men. Sam and Dean Winchester. They each have dedicated pages with their whole lives mapped out.
Sam and Dean are fictional brothers and apparently the heroes. Each of their respective profiles begins with an illustrated image from book covers, and then a series of quotes that contradict those pictures. Then their lives are intricately detailed, or should you say they are chronologically recorded according to each book. You would read their histories in full if it wasn't for how tiny the scroll bar is, indicating that these profile pages are ridiculously long.
You sit back in your chair and take a deep breath in the hopes of it being soothing. Or answering all your questions. It does neither. You have no answers and more stress.
This went beyond two men pretending to do your job now. Those guys were driving around in a car with fictional license plates. What was this? Some weirdly immersive cosplay? Was that something Sam and Dean did in the books?
Even so, those two guys weren’t roleplaying at comic con, they were actually in that woman's home. If you hadn't arrived they could have done anything. They could be doing anything now.
There's a ding from the kitchen which means the frozen meal you’d thrown in the oven is ready. Not that you stop thinking about this while you go and grab it because the more you think the less sense everything makes. Like why is a narrator who, until now, was obsessed with those guys, so very silent all of a sudden?
Back at your desk with hot food, you head back to google to see if you can buy these books anywhere because knowledge is power. Unfortunately, not even Amazon has copies. It’s only when you add the term “ebook” to your search do you find a Tumblr blog with links to download all the files, split into two categories. Published and unpublished. There are a lot of Supernatural books and from the looks of it there’s an equal amount of drama over how the unpublished ones got out.
You start downloading them without consciously making a decision to read them. Downloading kind of happens because your macaroni cheese is too hot for your mouth to handle yet, and your hands still need something to do. Besides you didn’t necessarily need to read all of them, if they were truly terrible you’d delete the files. No harm, no foul. But if this was the only way to get answers then you and your kindle were going to be pretty busy this weekend.
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“Morning Laura.” Nobody likes Mondays, yet you have a little bounce in your step having made your usual green tea, got dressed, and driven to work in complete and utter silence. In fact, you’d heard nothing all weekend. The caveat was that, yes, you’d spent all weekend reading those books.
You liked reading and without discrimination. Trashy romance novels at the airport? You betcha. Fantasy books thicker than your mattress? Sure thing, order a pizza. But a mystery? Well, those were your favorite. Of course, the detective needed some sort of sketchy backstory and there had to be a fishy amount of red herrings. Most importantly there had to be something to solve. It was an elevation of your day to day life and you always get sucked in. In your job, you try to solve the most benign mysteries; people faking insurance claims. More often than not there isn’t even a mystery to solve, someone really did slip and break something. So, a mystery that grabs you out of nowhere is like a promotion for you, a challenge.
That had been how those Supernatural books had dragged you in. Ghosts and ghouls you could take or leave, you might have stopped reading if that’s all there was. Then this Carver Edlund went and put in that damn side plot about their missing father. It was too enticing, addicting. From the cryptic disappearance to the indecipherable journal of clues. John Winchester would be the death of you.
Or case 24-01 would be. The jury was still out on that.
And now it’s Monday. You’ve heard nothing more from the voice in your head—it may have been a low-level case of carbon monoxide poisoning—and the boys are so close to figuring everything out you can taste it. Technically they know John is alive by now, you finished Shadow some point yesterday afternoon and felt yourself choke up at the emotional goodbye with a father they just got back. But they still have no clue what he's up to, which is a hideous funhouse mirror reflection of your own life. Hopefully, by the time they figure out John’s game plan, you'll have your life figured out too. And fingers crossed figuring everything out will involve staying alive as well.
“You look like you’re feeling better this morning.” Laura is her perky self, always a little too happy for this side of 9am.
Oh right, you went home sick on Friday. You should remember things like that. “I think it was a bug or something I ate maybe.”
“Sure, sure. One of those convenient Friday bugs.” She winks at you.
If she accused you of that say, last week, you’d have laughed it off given that's a thing everyone has in common; trying to skip out on work. So, that's what you try to do this side of the weekend. You push out something that hopefully resembles a regular person's laugh like you’re in on the joke. You have to fake it because you’re still thinking about Providence. The book you’d finished that morning instead of watching the news. You’re still wondering if Sam is starting to move on after Jessica. 
Needless to say, you understand now. The many fan blogs and the artwork you’d glanced at before you started reading. All those things that you’d disregarded as an unhealthy fascination for a bunch of books. Now you’re one of them, obsessed. Walking into the office with your kindle tucked in your bag and Salvation just begging to be read.
This goes beyond finding John. That plot got its hooks in you but you’ve known John was alive since Home and you’re still reading. You could also blame this on your general love of reading except it goes beyond that too. Honestly, it’s hard to pick one thing. They’re really great books. Sam and Dean have such turbulent lives but they still have each other. They’re snarky, lost, angry, and caring. They’re both so different but the sibling relationship is so real. And the stories go beyond a new monster every book, there are these huge interesting story arcs that you couldn't stop reading if you tried. John Winchester had been the first example of these addictive plot points, but not the only one.
“Y/N?”
You snap your head up, “sorry, sorry.”
“I was only saying you’re going to be here all day then, lunch?”
Even though Laura must see the decision on your face she still pretends to hope until you start speaking. “Actually I have a lot to catch up on so I’ll probably be working through. Tomorrow?”
She smiles brightly and nods, “sure thing.”
As bad as you feel about lying to Laura she has presented you an opportunity. Everyone thinks you were sick on Friday. They even think you're behind on your work and they don’t know you’ve already conducted the initial interview. Which makes your decision to sit at your desk and prop your kindle up next to your screen even easier. Nobody would notice the difference between you concentrating or reading. If you skip lunch you might be able to get to Bloodlust out of the way too.
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Continue to Chapter 4.
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5eva tags: @divadinag @darthdeziewok @fluentinfiction @witch-of-letters @supernatural-teamfreewillpage @magnitude101999 @alexwinchester23  Dean babes: @thewinchesterchronicles @akshi8278​ @bloodydaydreamer StrangerThanFiction tags: @jaylarkson
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How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
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omarplummer · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
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bunnysunnymew · 5 years
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Bunnysunnymew’s tips and tricks for buying commissions
Hey people of tumblr. So I’ve been buying commissions for over 2 years now and I thought I’d give out some helpful tips and tricks for those of you just getting into it, things that I wish I had know when I stated commissioning. First advice is don’t start because it quickly becomes an addiction. However if you still want to, here's what to do.
DO
ASK! About EVERYTHING. Check their TOS and commission page first and if you can’t find information there then MAKE SURE YOU ASK! Before you pay them be sure you  know:
Their refund policy
Their estimated wait time
Their “changes fee” policy. Meany artist charge extra if they have to make a change to the drawing (or even to the sketch for some) and that can wrack up to be a handful. Avoid commissioning people unwilling to make changes after the product is given
Their policy on you using the art  and posting the art to other websites. Some Artists put tricky little clauses in their Terms of Service saying you can’t post it anywhere or with customs and adopts you can’t do certain things with the character, so make sure you know that first and avoid commissioning people with a lot of restrictions
THEIR TERMS OF SERVICE! And make sure you read it thoroughly! I know we are all used to just clicking agree when it comes to tos’s on other things but when it comes to art IT IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIALLY THAT YOU READ IT! Otherwise they can just wright in clauses stating all payment is final and they have unlimited time to complete it so you might wait two years and still be empty handed, and they still legally will have the upperhand on you.
If WIPs (works in progress) are induced or if you have to ask for them
Their will not draw list. Some artists have certain things that they will not draw, like not safe for work, fetishes overly complicated machines, furries, gore, and offensive content. If you want a drawing of something that is on someone's do not draw list, do yourself a favor, find someone else.This is not for their sake, its for yours. All you are going to be doing is wasting everyone's time and making the artists (and their fans when they rant about it publicly) very angry. And if you somehow do talk them into drawing it, witch 99% of the time you won’t they will do a garbage job. Trust me, there is always someone else who is willing to draw what you want. It doesn't matter how much you liked their style find someone else someone whos all about that kind of art and you will have a much more pleasant time.
Currency conversions. Not everyone does things in the american dollar so if their paying in pounds, CAD, yen or whatever know how much the american equivalent is. A Lot of people who are not american will have lower prices, however this isnt always the case
2) Utilize same day commissions
This induces in stream commissions on websites like https://picarto.tv where you can get your commission in stream! This is a guarantee that you will avoid people who take months and months to complete or never deliver at all. Just keep in mind that not everyone on those websites who tag their stuff as commissions are taking them right then and there, so you might need to fish around a little bit before finding a winner
This also induces commissions at conventions, especially ones that have multiple days, Make sure you hit up the vendor's hall before you go to any of the panels so you can get on their list faster. If they say it will be done by the end of the convention then thats a green light and your good to go. HOWEVER, IF THEY SAY THAT IT WILL BE MAILED/SENT AFTER THE CON, OR IF YOU GO TO THEM ON THE LAST DAY OF THE CON TOWARDS THE END OF THE DAY AND YOUR COMMISSION'S STILL NOT DONE YET BE EXTREMELY WEARY! Even so some of them may be genuine and honest,  just as many of them will look you in they eye and promise you your commission and then  never deliver. THIS INCLUDES PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALREADY PROVIDED YOU WITH A PRODUCT.
              ~Storytime: So one time I was at a convention and I found this person who made furry badges at a great price, so I bought one, and I’ll admit to this day its one of if not the best piece of art I have of the character that I commissioned (and believe me, I have a lot of art of this character). Because of this I felt inclined to trust the artist when they told me they would mail it out to me and not only did I buy another commission but I convinced my younger sister to buy one as well  (AND SHE PAID CASH). I was surprised when I saw them at a convention a few weeks later taking more commissions, but I was like its ok its only been a few weeks. Fast foreword to the end of the month, and I still don’t have ether commission. I contact them several times after, sometimes they reply, sometimes they ignore me. 3 months later, they sent me a WIP for my commission. I thanked for the update. I continues asking questions about my commission and my sisters commission. A month later I revived my commission. My sister on the other hand NEVER received hers. After moths and moths of integrating the artist, they claimed the art must have gotten lost in the mail. And insted of refunding her the full amount, (she paid 30 dollars) they claimed she paid 20 and refunded my paypal (because they didn't have hers) 19 dollars and 20 cents (even less than what she claimed my sister paid). You want to know why she got away with it? Because my sister paid cash so we didn't have proof and because we trusted the artist to keep their word. Do not make the same mistake!
3) Set due dates if you can. If you can get them to agree a commission must be done by a certain date or you will be refunded you are much much safer. Keep in mind meny artists aren’t willing to do this  because they claim a due date stresses them out or something so when you find someone who will hold onto that person and don’t let go. Although it's not guaranteed they won't bail on you and just stop responding, this extra insurance makes it far less likey that you’ll get ripped off
4) Search around for good prices first. Don’t just settle with the first person that has nice art, look around! Expensive artists usually are not worth it, and you will get way more bang for your buck if you take the time to search for example this:
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Cost me less then 7 dollars
 It took me a while to find this sweet deal, I was searching all day on the streams for a good artist to draw me some stuff and at one point I was getting so desperate i was almost willing to just pay 15 dollars for a sketch, when I stumbled upon this lovey lovey artist. This wasn’t even the first thing I commissioned them, when I saw what great quality they had for a low prices I got another!  They are hidden, but people with great affordable prices are out there, so don’t waste your money with people who are gonna overcharge or charge you more for art than you feel comfortable with
5) Check out their other artwork first. NEVER commission someone until you have thoroughly gone though their gallery and seen examples of past commissions. Sometimes Artists will make their icons prices they commissioned themselves or only put their best work on the front page. Don't ever assume buy looking at one piece that all their art will be the same quality.
6) If your asking about the prices of something make sure you specify that you are only inquiring about the commission and have not yet fully committed. This is very important, both with emails and in person commissions. Don't let them add you to their queue until you've make payment, especially in live streams. Say you are asking for reference and you aren't sure yet in the first sentence. It will make the artist a little disappointed, but it will make them much more disappointed if they start working on your art and you back out, and if they finish the piece before they realize you were just inquiring, you can get in some real hot water.
~Storytime, one time I was at a convention and I was going around asking if artists would be willing to make a certain piece for me (that involved controversial subject matter). The artist immediately asked for my name and information which I guess should have been a bg read flag, and then they sent me a text saying they had started working on it. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that I actually wasn’t interested because the prices were so high, so I ended up paying 50 dollars for something that (while they had clearly put effort into and it wasn't bad) I couldn't afford and didn't exactly value that much. Anxiety about hurting artists feelings can come at the worst of times, even to people like me who are praticuraly strong willed. Do yourself a favor and avoid the situation entirely by being extra clear up front and avoiding any misunderstandings from the get go
7) Barter prices in PRIVATE. This is one I say use with caution, because there are some artists who will be offended that you even asked. However, for every artist I’ve meet who has been like “HOW DARE YOU ASK ME TO CHANGE MY PRICES?!” there are 2 others that were like “yeah, that sounds ok”. Just whatever you do, DO NOT ASK ABOUT IT IN PUBIC! Not unless you want a ton of their rabid fans to come after you and send you nasty hate messages about committing what they view as ultimate sin against their senpai
8) Use flowery, delicate language when asking for changes, discounts and anything else extra that you might want. Artists tend to be hypersensitive people who can sometimes take it personally when you ask them to change their art.  That's why you need to sugar coat EVERYTHING when you talk to them. For example, instead of saying something like “Why did you not draw little white mittens on the end of mittens paws? Did you not read anything I sent you about his character description? Did you not look at the ref at all??? It's LITERALLY IN HIS NAME  YOU Imbecile!” Try something like “ Hey it’s looking really good so far but is there any way you can add little white mittens on his paws? I thought I mentioned that in the original message I sent you but I’m very sorry if I didn’t” Try to avoid accusing them of anything unless it's absolutely necessary because they do not react well to that at all
9) Tip if they did something extra for you, did an amazing job, or have prices you feel are to low. Providing incentive for good behavior will make it more likely to happen in the future.
10) Follow the artist on the social media platform you found them on and if they don't post regularly, do not commission them (more on that later). This will also let you know when they have sales, and any updates and delays you may be having that may delay
11) provide a ref if you can. If it's your first commission ever you may be thinking, “but bunny, I can’t draw! That’s why I’m commissioning other people to draw for me!” Let me tell you something, A POORLY DRAWN REF IS BETTER THAN NO REF AT ALL. Descriptions are ok but they allow a lot of room for error. Provide a description and some kind of drawing, even if its poorly drawn. The artist won't judge you, your paying them. If not you can commission someone without a visual ref, however be aware you may be setting yourself up for potential major inconstancys 
12) try offering them cash to speed up your commission if they aren't doing it fast enough. Not all artist will do this but some will. Cation though, I would not advise this with people who you have never commissioned before and have taken alone time with your commission with no WIP, and they might just be taking your money with no result
13)Have cation with sellers who don't speak your native language. Non-English speakers might have cheaper prices, and be super sweet. However leagues barrier can sometimes cause problem as to communicating what kind of commission you want which can cause problems
14) Check their queue first!!!!!!!!!
~Storytime. So somewhat recently I commissioned someone on furaffinity. And i checked all my boxes. They had good prices, specialized in what I was looking for, seemed active and had a consistent gallery. So I went ahead and commissioned them 30 dollars worth of art. Then I SAW THEIR QUEUE AND FELT INSTANT REGRET. You see I commissioned them in October, of this year. Their queue went back to 2016. It's been over a month now with no WIP and honestly I doubt I’ll be getting it any time soon ALWAYS CHECK FIRST!
Dont:
1) pay in cash (paper cash). If your read the story about the unfaithful commissioner above you probably just in case you should know that when you pay in cash at conventions the majority of people do not provide physical receet. Not only this but even if they do they are easy to lose. I strongly advise you pay with card and pay the extra card processing fee because that gets you a permanent non-loseable proof of precious so it's way harder for them to rip you off.
2) Commission your IRL friends. But they are your best friend and you have to be supportive, right! No! do not do it! I don’t care how good their art is, or how good their prices are, never commission your IRL close friends! It is not worth possible fights and your friendship
~Storytime: So one time I decided to commission one of my best friends in the world. I have known this person for years, they are honestly one of the funniest sweetest and best humans I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. I would take a bullet for this person. That being said I will NEVER EVER EVER COMMISSION THEM AGAIN. Now I came to them about a custom character I had come up with and they said they would do a colored drawing for 15 dollars witch was a good deal. I’d also like to mention that I had commissioned them multiple times in the past with absolutely no problems. But this time I had gotten into a personal fight with my friend, I felt like they were not spending enough time with me and they felt like I was interionaly going out of my way to make them feel bad. So when I inquired about my oc, I was a bit hostel. However this person decided to take their hostility to another level. They claimed that I requested too many changes to the oc and because they helped come up with the design and draw it themselves it was their property now, then said they were going to sell MY OC as an adoptable on their page and they wouldn't let me buy it. I convinced them to sell me back MY OWN OC (and a sketch of my own OC) for the same price as the original commission was worth, then they said i wasn't aloud to make any changes or edits to the art otherwise they regain rights to the OC and If I posted the sketch anywhere I had to use the version with their obnoxiously large signature otherwise they would regain rights to the OC. When I accused them of messing up my commission out of spite for a personal feud, they admitted that was the reason and said it doesn't matter because it's their art. Eventually we both apologize and made up, but that still doesn't change the fact that my commissioner tried to steal my own oc. It was by far the worst commission experience i ever had
3) publicly criticize their prices. It’ll just tick them off and send their little minions after you. It doesn't matter how ridiculous it is, just let it be and let the free market work itself out, they never view it as helpful anyways, and not selling anything is the only way to get most of them to learn
4)commission artists unwilling to change their style. This is why you ask about changes up front, because if they aren't willing to make changes, they aren't worth commissioning. It doesn't matter how much your paying them either. I paid 60 dollars to an artist and they were still unwilling to make a basic change because it “didn’t suit their style”
5) Use friends and family feature on paypal:  see something like this?
Tumblr media
BE SKEPTICAL! PayPal separates these options into two separate categories for a reason! AND THAT REASON IS BUYER PROTECTION! IF YOU USE THE FRIENDS AND FAMILY OPTION YOU ARE GIVING UP ALL YOUR RIGHTS AS A CONSUMER, LIKE THE RIGHT TO A REFUND IF THE PRODUCT IS NEVER DELIVERED! DON'T DO IT! Insted, just offer to pay the difference. A Lot of artists just do this to get around paypal service fee, so if you pay the service fee yourself, there shouldn't be an issue. If they still want you to use the friends and family feature back out!
6) Bug the artist too much. While it is important to get your art in a timely manner, asking an artist constantly will mostly likely make them angry. That's why you get an ETA at the beginning. If they say it will take a week it's ok to ask them about updates every other day, but not if they say it will take a month. If they don’t give you an eta then ask away because you don’t want to get scammed. They kinda brought it on themselves at that point.
7) Be a pushover: this is probably the hardest one, but if they draw something super wrong tell them. You paid money for it, at the end of the day you getting a product that you paid for is more important than their feelings being intact
8)ASSUME THAT THE AMOUNT YOU PAY WILL EQUATE TO THE QUALITY OF THE ART!
Let me show you something
Tumblr media
^ this was 17 dollars
Tumblr media
^this was 10
and THIS (not linking bc I’m not trying to publicly attack them)
Tumblr media
Was 60. All are about the same quality. Actually, I’d argue the 60 dolor one is worth less than the others. Sometimes you can get a bang for your buck. Other times you pay a bunch of money and get next to nothing. Don't assume because you payed a lot of money for something it will be high quality, or vice versa
9)Commission big name artists if you don’t want to pay more money
the more popular they are the more they can change, it's simple economics. Good news is it's hard for popular artists to rip people off because they are in the spotlight and have a lot to lose from doing so. Bad news, expect high prices and long wait times from the get go
10) commission someone rarely active. If you don’t see very much activity on their account that's a huge red flag they might go off the grid
11) treat the artist like a friend or get super personal with them (or flirt with them)
Treat your artist the same way you would treat any other person you'd do business with. Sure they might inspire you and you may relate to their work but that doesn't mean they wanna hear about your life problems or be your best friend. It is a profession, so keep it professional. And if you try flirting with them over a risque piece all you are going to do is make them extremely uncomfortable and get yourself blocked. Just because you pay them money does not make them your friend. It makes you their customer, the same as a lower, doctor, or local cashier.
12) buy a commission you don't want.  Do not buy out of obligation because you talked to them. You will run out of money very quickly
That’s about it. feel free to add on to this post if you guys find anything else. Sorry about all the spelling mistakes, I suck at spelling. I ran it through google docs but I know there’s a lot of stuff that wasn't caught.
2 notes · View notes
bala-hota · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
dawnlacarte1 · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
aaronblass · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
dermotcollca · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
danidhenga · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
thomasscottedwards · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
edwardrosovich · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
davidaazam · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
johndavidhartigan · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
0 notes
sabethsiddique · 4 years
Text
How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
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adamneidenberg · 4 years
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How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around
What does the perfect business email look like? For some go-getters, it might be the 21st century of War and Peace: it’s long, it leaves no stone unturned, and it contains enough detail that anyone who reads it will be impressed by your work ethic and flowery language.
This is wrong.
A good email is less art than it is science. It’s a means to an end, with a clear objective: get someone else to understand something that you already understand. Whether that means a project just finished or you have a new proposal, a well-crafted email should be clear, efficient, and engaging—without demanding too much from the reader.
We spend some 1/3rd of our office time checking and managing our email. It only makes sense to get it right.
Here’s how to construct one without constantly editing yourself:
The Basic Rules of Email
Before you optimize the efficiency of every email you send, let’s get rid of some of the simple mistakes that are only making your written communication worse.
First, double-check that you’re sending it to the right people. In one famous mistake, Aviva Investors sent an email meant to fire one person…to a list of 1,300 people.
Before you hit “Reply All,” take a few seconds to consider what “All” includes. Here’s an example of a faux pas you can avoid if you were to double-check the email recipients every time:
“OK, so I was online dating a lot,” Shirley Goldberg remembered. After each date, she liked to send a summary to her girlfriend. “On the day I hit ‘Reply to All,’ I had four emails open, one of them directed to the entire staff of my school. Somehow I got the emails mixed up.”
This can be even more damaging in the professional environment. That’s why you should aim to keep each email as professional as possible. After all, email still counts as written communication. If you don’t want yourself on record as having said something, don’t email it. In company-wide email threads, it’s possible that even if you don’t send the email to the wrong person, what you wrote can still end up in someone else’s text.
Unsure if your writing is grammatically correct? Consider adding an app like Grammarly to your browser if you’re using web-based email.
Focus on Clarity
The ancient Roman rhetorician Quintilian once said:
We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.
Before you do anything else, make sure that your email is clear. That usually means the shorter it is, the better—there will be fewer opportunities for misinterpretation in a 100-word email than a 1,000-word email.
Write short sentences. Turn to HemingwayApp for help here. It will point out where you’re over-stuffing your sentences and making too many demands on the reader.
Use active voice rather than passive. “I finished the project” is clearer than “the project was finished by me.” It’s also more efficient. 
Organize your email paragraphs by topic. Similar to the way you’d structure a high school essay, keep your organization simple: one topic per paragraph.
Don’t “bury the lead.” Burying the lead happens when you hide an important nugget of information somewhere within the content. This leads to less emphasis on the important point. If you’ve ever wondered how you can write someone an email and they forgot about its most important message, it sometimes comes from buying the lead.
Read before sending. If you keep the email simple, you won’t have a problem reviewing it quickly before sending off. Don’t make more work for the recipient by asking them to read your mind. Make sure the email, as Quintilian recommends, is “impossible to misunderstand” from the outset.
Don’t Waste Time
You’ll enhance clarity when you stick to this rule: don’t waste time.
If you’re sending an email proposal to someone you don’t know, there’s a temptation to spend two paragraphs apologizing or explaining yourself. Don’t! Just include a brief sentence that mentions how you found their email and move on. If their time is valuable, thank them for sparing some. Then proceed to stop wasting it.
One brief sentence at the top of an email is usually enough to let someone know that you’re aware when an email might be out of the blue, or coming in some sort of strange context. If you’re networking, include a sentence that describes a mutual contact, for example. While you should focus on clarity, you’ll still want to display some social acuity when you’re emailing someone new for the first time.
When Scripts are Available (and Make Sense), Use Scripts
If you’re sick of staring at a blinking cursor and want to make some progress, you can always lean on email scripts to get you started.
The key here isn’t to copy and paste everything you write, but to remember the human touch. But once you’ve determined that you’ll do that, you can use some email scripts as reference points:
Groove supplies 17 email scripts, including influencer outreach scripts and guest post pitches.
Ramit Sethi’s networking scripts aren’t only useful, but the article explains how to avoid many of the same pitfalls as other networkers.
The Muse offers 27 templates for difficult workplace emails as well. You might want to use these only as a reference, however, and avoid direct copy-and-pasting when it comes to the most sensitive emails.
Practice Makes Perfect
You might not write perfectly effective emails every time. But as you get used to the work environment and routinely send out similar emails, you’ll get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Pay attention to the questions people tend to ask in their replies and you’ll soon learn that you can answer them ahead of time. Over time, you’ll settle on a natural rhythm to your emails to help you avoid long email chains, back-and-forth question sessions, and even the occasional faux pas. from The Grasshopper Blog - Insights for Entrepreneurs https://grasshopper.com/blog/How to Write an Effective Email the First Time Around/ via IFTTT
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