Dear new developer,
Writing great emails is a key skill. For all the hullabaloo about slack, emails still rule the roost when it comes to cross organization communication. This is because everyone has email, it is auditable and uneditable once sent, and requires no special permission beyond knowledge of an email address.
Email is great at conveying information, but horrible at conveying context. It also can be unclear and ambiguous. Because email is asynchronous, ambiguity causes slowdowns and confusion more than ambiguity in conversation (where you can say something like “when you said tomorrow, do you mean Saturday or Monday, the next business day?”).
This post has some great tips on how to write great emails. From the post:
Avoid using only temporal adverbs/nouns like yesterday, today, tomorrow, two hours ago etc but include also the specific dates/times otherwise they might be misunderstood or require from recipients to check the email’s sent date/time to calculate the actual time.
and
Use bookmarkable links when you refer to something that would eventually require from the recipient to search for in another platform.
There are a number of other great tips for writing clear emails in this post. The author also provides before and after examples, which really illustrate the points.
Worth a read.
Sincerely,
Dan
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