In this week's bonus, we talk to communications coach and author Joel Schwartzberg about practical strategies for writing better emails. We look at how to craft subject lines that get opened, why you should limit paragraphs to three sentences, and when to stick to one point per email. And we look at why those endless "re: re: re:" threads might be costing you important messages.
In this week's bonus, we talk to communications coach and author Joel Schwartzberg about practical strategies for writing better emails. We look at how to craft subject lines that get opened, why you should limit paragraphs to three sentences, and when to stick to one point per email. And we look at why those endless "re: re: re:" threads might be costing you important messages.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings, Grammar Paloozians. I am here with Joel Schwartzberg. And we just talked about his fabulous book, Get to the Point. It will help you write and speak to make your point better, to get people to do the things you want them to do, to learn the things you want them to learn. And Joel is now going to tell us how to write better email by getting to the point. Joel, thank you so much for being here.
Joel Schwartzberg: Thank you, Mignon. And thank you to all of the Grammar Paloozians. Did I say that right?
Mignon Fogarty: You did. Yeah. And Joel is a communications coach, speaker, and speechwriter. He was the senior director of strategic and executive communications for a major national organization for 10 years before he was holding the senior communications and editorial roles at Paramount, PBS, and Time, Inc. So he definitely has the background to give us the right information. You can absolutely trust what he's saying. So Joel.
Joel Schwartzberg: Yeah. I'm so glad to do this, Mignon, because I would coach clients. And when I was working as a speechwriter, I'd work with the entire executive team. And I would train them to make strong points in their presentations. And then they would email me, and I would see those points buried under a lot of stuff and buried where they really should be amplified. So I put some ideas together. I wrote an article for Fast Company. I turned it into part of my training. And I got a lot of really good feedback from this because we often email more than anything else, even with texting and chat mechanisms and posting and all the ways we communicate.
At least I find in the workplace, we are emailing more so than anything. So it's crucial to make the right impression, give the right information at the right time. So I'd love to jump right in because there's one place where it matters most, where we most want to get to the point. And that is the subject line. Because you're coming into work in the morning, you open up your email, you see a bunch of subject lines. Usually your email is not set up to preview some emails, but maybe it does. But really, you're probably still looking at those subject lines, and you're making some critical decisions. Do I read this now? Do I archive it? Do I kind of leave it there and read it later? Do I delete it because I know it's not relevant to me? We can all admit those are pretty crucial decisions. And if somebody deletes an email that was critical, that's problematic. And that happens at the subject line level. So there are two things I recommend people do. One is get to the point of the email. And really the question is, what do I need to say so that they do the right thing? Archive, read now, or delete. That's the question you need to answer. Not so much why do they need to read this, but what they should do next with it. So I'll often say things like membership proposal, or new marketing campaign, or client B crisis, or because I was a speechwriter, there was a lot of things I needed people to review. So I would say client outreach, or I would say letter to the editor or op-ed.
Mignon Fogarty: Would you say like review required or?
Joel Schwartzberg: Well, that's the next thing. And this is maybe even more important. Before I put the content of the email, I would put a sort of a preface, often in all caps. Sometimes it would be attached, but a lot of times it would be for review. So all caps for review, colon, sentence caps, or initial caps, membership campaign proposal, or all caps urgent, colon, client crisis, or all caps response needed for consideration, feedback requested. Now people will say, well, all caps you're screaming at people. I'm not saying the whole thing needs to be all caps, but if something is urgent, they may not see it quickly enough if it's in sentence caps. So I would say put that in all caps, colon, and whatever you need. Now some people also push back and say, well, there's a thread going on, so I don't want to mess up that thread. Well, here's the question. Do you want to keep a thread and possibly risk having people miss your key message just because you kept the thread? Or can you tweak the thread in some small way so that urgent messaging can come up? We're not dummies in the office. A few key words should help us understand this is about the proposal we just sent. This is about the client crisis or the fourth quarter revenue. That's not a lot of words. Some of them are numbers. So you can still put that in there,but if there's a new element to it, it really needs to go there. And Mignon, I have been in situations where I did not follow up on something because it was not in the subject line and somewhere in the email it said, Joel, can you get back to me by tomorrow? And it's not that I didn't see that. It's that I never opened that email. I mean, how many times do we look at a subject line and say, oh, re, re, re, re, re, re, re, re, Thursday? That can't be relevant anymore. And meanwhile, it was six Thursdays ago. But just yesterday, someone added to that thread a brilliant idea that could be game-changing and nobody read it because they all thought this was last week's thread. So watch your re's. And by that, I mean, re, re, re, re, thing. Often in my workshop, I ask people to open up their phones. You never hear this in a conference.I say, get out your phones now. Look at your email. Look at your sent mail. And tell me a subject line that you'd like to change. And everybody had a re, re, re, re, Tuesday, a re, re, re, re, thing, a re, thing, a re, idea, a re, proposal. And you just got to ask the question, do you think they knew exactly what you're talking about? And the answer was no. So it all starts there in the subject line. And people don't improve anything else. That can be a significant improvement.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. OK, so then what next? Are we talking about numbered lists or bulleted lists in the body of the email to make it easier to skim, scan?
Joel Schwartzberg: We're actually talking about the hello. Because if I came to you, Mignon, and we were in the same office, and I said, here's the proposal. You know, that'd be a little rude if I just kind of came up to you and said that. Of course, I'd say, hey, Mignon, here's the proposal. Or hey, Mignon, how was your weekend? Here's your proposal. So why would we be OK with that in email? Email is still a one-to-one communication. Now, I'm not saying tell your life story or ask a bunch of probie questions. But just the mere words, hey, Mignon, I think that makes a difference because we're human beings. So I would start there. My only caution is we need to get rid of and retire gender-based hellos. Hi, guys. That needs to end across the board. And there are simple ways to do that. Hi, team. Hi, everyone. Hi, team so-and-so. It's time to let that one go. So then to get to your point, the body needs to start with what you need them to do most. I need you to review this proposal. I need your ideas following this brainstorming meeting. Bring that up. Otherwise, you're burying that point. It's just like bringing your point out early in the presentation. Then you can get into some of the details why. And I prefer bullet points to sentences. When you use bullet points, just be very aware of what those bullet points convey. A dot is neutral. A dot that's filled in or not filled in, that's neutral. But you know what? When you put one, two, three, four, five, you are implying that one is better than two, two is more important than three, or you need to do one first, then two, then three, then four. And if you use check marks, you need to realize that that usually means I have done this or you need to do this. This is a checklist. So if you want to be neutral, use the neutral dots. But my best advice, and if you remember two things, the subject line and this, this is what I really want everyone to do not only for their emails, but also for their blogs and their posts. And that is this rule. And I'm going to call it a rule. No more than three sentences per paragraph. Now I'm going to repeat that. No more than three sentences per paragraph. When you do this as an email writer or just as a writer,
it allows you to segregate your points and to see them one at a time or your pieces. Here's my point. Here's my backup or evidence. Here's what we're going to do next. So it enables your brain to see the parts. But more importantly, when the person on the other side of your email receives your email, they won't have to do a lot of decoding. We've all gotten the email. That's a wall of words. We've all seen LinkedIn posts that are a wall of words. And it's so annoying. And it makes you not want to read it, at least for me. So breaking it out. Now I could say write it shorter, write shorter paragraphs, be brief, but that's not prescriptive enough for me. I am literally saying no paragraph, more than three sentences. And I write a lot of two sentence
and one sentence paragraphs, whatever fulfills my need to get that piece of information clearly to the person I'm writing to.
Mignon Fogarty: And what are your thoughts on if you're replying? Let's say you're replying to someone and they have sent you a bulleted list or a numbered list of things that you need to respond to. Are you the kind of person who will reply all at the top or do you reply in line like under each point?
Joel Schwartzberg: This is what I do. And I did it just this morning. I will copy that list of bullet points, of questions, let's say. I will paste it into my reply. And then I will put my answers in red or bold or some way below each of those questions. What I don't like really is when I receive an email and it's a see below and then it has answers because then I need to go down and often it's in the same font so I need to decode it. Your job as an email communicator is to make it as clear as possible. So use bold, use colors. What's even worse is when you get an email that says, all right, and I just saw this recently. That's funny. It said number one, yes. Number two, maybe. Number three, next week. And I'm like, great. All right, going up, going down, going up, going down. So generally, whatever I do, the rule is always the same. You know, if I feel like they need the attachment, I'll forward it. I won't reply because I want them to see it. Or even if I do want to reply, I'll attach it. So everything I can do to make a very clean, very clear message in that email and as much as possible, one message at a time. With the CEOs I've worked with, I've often early on I said, oh, here attached. I need you to review this document. By the way, as you know, next week we're going to have this. Do you have time for that? And by the way, did you get that letter from one of our, you know, customers about this? So I get a reply back and he only answered the first question.
Mignon Fogarty: Mm-hmm.
Joel Schwartzberg: Now I've got to write a second email that, oh, and then someone's got to be shamed because now he's got to say, I'm sorry, I missed those two and he'll only answer one again.
Mignon Fogarty: As per my previous message.
Joel Schwartzberg: Yeah, as per my previous, see below. So I really try to make only one point at a time. I don't want to, you know, fill up their inbox. So if I can separate it, usually one is more urgent than another. So I'll sit on one and maybe send that one after lunch. And they, you know, this way, by the way, also when you separate them, they can have their own specific, you know, phrases at the top. The subject lines can be specific to those particular needs in those two emails. So, yeah, I think a big rule is try to stick to one point per email because that's the way it will be most easily answered.
Mignon Fogarty: This is so helpful. If people follow your advice, their lives will be better.
Joel Schwartzberg: Yeah, it makes my life better. Let me tell you. And people often, they'll read my email and I think they'll even model their reply back or they'll say to me, oh, I like how you phrase that. Even if someone is saying, oh, you're going to be on the podcast today. I don't write back and say, okay. I say, okay, I'm confirming and I'll put the day and the date and then I'll have to have a check on my calendar. Everything I can possibly do, especially if I'm like when I was interviewing for a job and things like that, I wanted to impress them with my ability to communicate. So I would repeat a lot of the same information to make sure we were all on the same page at all times.
Mignon Fogarty: So I can confirm that you're a very easy guest to book and to communicate with through the process. Thank you so much for being here! And now my favorite part of the show is getting your book recommendations? We have three favorite books. So what are your books Joel?
Joel Schwartzberg: Thank you so much for not only asking this of me but giving me some time to pull them and to make the best decision. So one of my favorite authors is Chris Fenning, and he wrote this book about the first minute, and this is very similar to my books. He really gets to the point but he talks about how to make the impression you want in the very earliest parts of your communication and how to do it effectively. There's a lot of overlap between his book and mine and actually he wrote the forward to the new edition of my book because I just love his philosophy. The second is a book called Ben Gutman. It's called Simply Put, and this is about clarity also, but what I like about what Ben does is he uses tons and tons of real world examples of advertising firms and brands that had a very diluted or too complex message. What he would do or what they did to make those messages cleaner and more simple. And the final one is this guy. His name is Michael Alley and he's a professor of scientific communication and he was finding that the PowerPoints that his students were showing were a mess. Even with, you know, the presenter saying look at this, look at that, look at that. They weren't making their points, and he developed this philosophy of assertion evidence. That's it. Assertion evidence. In the title you put your assertion. The rest of the slide is about creating evidence whether that's statistical or storytelling or logic to prove that assertion. And that concept I think can be used in many other places than just scientific PowerPoints. It can be used for all PowerPoints and for all presentations because the idea of having a point means that you're proving your point and a point is an assertion. So when you think of your presentation or your email as assertion and then evidence or support for why you're making that assertion, it's just a very clean, simple way to make your point compelling. So I think he did a great job of that and I'd love for more people to know about him. That's Michael Alley, and this is called The Craft of Scientific Presentations.
Mignon Fogarty: I see. So you know you raised a question for me thinking about PowerPoints. There are sort of two schools of thought. So one is that you shouldn't have any words on your slide at all. It should just be like maybe one big picture and that the slides, people lean too much on their slides by having too much information on them. But I've seen a lot of advice about how to deliver information on your slides. Like where do you fall in that argument about PowerPoint?
Joel Schwartzberg: Yeah, well we could have a whole podcast about this, believe me, because a lot of the clients I get, we spend a lot of time fixing their PowerPoints. And so I'm a visual learner. I benefit so much from watching the words and the points that you're making as you say them because it reinforces for me your point. If I just hear a presenter say it without a PowerPoint or just with some funny picture or cartoon, I'm just not going to digest it as well as when you present it to me visually. And I think there are a lot of also of other visual learners. But ultimately, I think the PowerPoint should serve to reinforce, not make, but reinforce the points that the presenter puts forth. And it all starts if there's one thing that I recommend to everyone that's the biggest mistake they make is in the subject line, in the title of each slide. I call that the most important real estate of a slide because if you happen to be checking your email while the person is talking and you come back and you're like, wait, what is this about again? You should go to that title and see what is the point of that particular page. But what do we see there most often? We see things like background, our partners, and history, and statistics, just the word statistics, not this went up 10% when they used our product, which can fit in the title space, by the way, just statistics. So that is in PowerPoint, probably the number one place we could be making our points but do not. So to answer your question, Mignon, yes, I believe in PowerPoint. I believe it's used most effectively to support your point, especially in the title of each slide.
Mignon Fogarty: Excellent. Well, it's all about making your point, getting to the point because the book is Get to the Point. Simplify, sharpen, and sell your message. I found it very helpful, and I think you'll like it too. Joel, thank you so much for being here. Joel Schwartzberg, where can people find you online?
Joel Schwartzberg: They can learn more about me and see everything I've written and all of the work I do at my website, which is at www.joelschwartzberg.net. That's also where they can find information about bringing me to you because I love training the get to the point principles to groups and professionals.
Mignon Fogarty: Excellent. Thank you so much.
Joel Schwartzberg: Thank you, Mignon.