Paragraphs, Full Sentences, and Tone … Oh My!
[A version of this post originally appeared a few years ago in our weekly email newsletter and then was lightly edited for our 2024 summer re-run series here. And since the message bears repeating, I’m updating it again for 2025, with a new header image, a couple of additional observations, and links.]
This edition of Marginalia blends my research on how aging impacts our work with Yvonne’s longstanding peeve: illiterate emails.
I scribbled the margin note that became the title of this post in Carl Honoré’s 2018 book, Bolder: Making the Most of Our Longer Lives in a chapter called “Work: Old Hands on Deck.”
His story of how then-69-year-old Barbara Jones resolved a client’s problem and became an email diva should inspire us all.
Becoming Better, too
The chapter starts by reviewing the neuroscience and other research showing older workers outperform their youngers in many skills critical to teamwork and customer relations, skills he labels “social smarts” — empathy, patience, experience, overall emotional intelligence.
If you’re skeptical and don’t want to wait for your copy of the book to arrive, I’ve covered the same ground with links to the science in my Elderships blog post in the section “Busting Some Myths about Older Workers.” [More recently, I posted about my own experience on my 74th birthday, with quotes from Paul McCartney and others who’ve experienced “growing elder” that should inspire (or reassure) you that it’s not the desolate landscape too often feared when we’re younger.]
Honoré then offers Jones, who works from home for an insurance agency across the country, as an example:
“It all started when the agency assigned her the client from hell. … ‘He kept sending me short, abrupt emails demanding this and that,’ she says. After taking the time to think things over, she composed an email that clearly and concisely addressed all the client’s queries and misgivings. She used paragraphs and full sentences, chose her words very carefully, and adopted a gentle, conciliatory tone. It worked: the client signed on the dotted line …”
Equally important, the skills and effort that Jones put into crafting her email not only benefited herself, the client, and the agency’s short-term bottom line, but:
“… the agency held up her email as a model for all its customer service agents.”
As Jones herself says about her skill with people, “That has absolutely gotten better as I’ve gotten older.”
It’s a skillset to be nurtured
Please don’t get the idea that her ability to communicate well in emails magically appeared as she aged, like adult teeth or gray hairs. While our capacities for social smarts and the raw material of knowledge and experience grow as we age, the practical skills for putting them to use must be developed and maintained, as well.
Indeed, given the tools and trends pushing so many to rely on acronyms, emoticons, and short-hand phrases for communication, we might say the ability to convey meaning and understanding more fully in email writing provides a competitive career advantage — one that should be desired and defended.
As I noted, email illiteracy has been a pet peeve of Yvonne’s for as long as I’ve known her. She’s often spoken about applying some of the same writing style tips we use in blogging (and even book page layout) to make your emails more effective. For example,
- short (but full) sentences
- short paragraphs (web writers call it “chunking”)
- judicious use of formatting like subheadings, boldface, italics, bullet and numbered lists
She’s created an ebook, 15 Rules to Writing Effective Emails in the 21st Century. If you’re interested in the Effective Emails ebook, contact Yvonne with a comment here or a message on LinkedIn.
And TONE!
Okay, I used all-caps to drive home a point: in an email (or text, or tweet) they come across like a raised voice, or even as shouting. Use them only if that’s your purpose and you are certain that tone is appropriate. In other words, rarely.
We also recommend our friend Robert Whipple’s excellent book, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online — in which he devotes 86 pages to ways you can convey the right tone in your emails. Confirming my point about this being a career advantage, he concludes with a chapter called “E-xcellence: A Competitive Advantage” and closes with this:
“Organizations led by leaders who insist on efficient [email] communication will thrive as other groups that continue to ignore the issue struggle.”
And even if you’re an organization of one, or a few, you may need to become that leader who insists on paragraphs, full sentences, and tone!
Don’t be among those who struggle by coming across as illiterate. Or snarky when a compassionate tone is called for. Or bland when excitement is your intent.
Writing skill is not just for authors of books [GASP!]. In fact, practicing writing well in all your communication channels will pay dividends when you do sit down to craft that book in you.
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