Sending long emails to your customers and coworkers is generally discouraged. However, there are times when you just need to send a lengthy update or overview.
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In that case, you’ll want to do yourself and the recipient a favor by getting to the right point and making sure they don’t have to dig through long paragraphs for information.
In this article, we’ll tell you some sometimes that you can use to help make your long emails more readable and easier to respond to.
1. Use Bullet Points to Summarize
One of the most important things to remember when writing a long email is that the recipient will skim through it. In doing so, they may miss important information or questions because there was so much to read.
When writing a long email, you want to make sure that you make it easy for the recipient to see, yet find the key takeaway—in other words, you want to be precise in your email. That way, they get the information they need, and you’re likely to get a more thoughtful answer.
Each of the tips in this article will help you get more skimable, to-the-point emails—especially by using bullet points.
Writing information in point form doesn’t mean you can’t be conversational. You can have other parts of your email, such as the greeting and sign-off. However, summarizing the information in points will get the message across quickly and effectively.
Instead of including every detail, identify important information from your message and avoid being worrying. The recipient does not need a play-by-play of each topic, they only need the main points.
2. Use Bold for Important Points
It is not professional to use all caps in emails. However, you can point your reader in the right direction with some subtle bolding. Of course, you don’t want to do this for everything, but if there’s certain information you want to make sure they see, like a date, reminder, or action, bold it.
The example uses bold only for headings and two phrases, both of which the sender wants the reader to act on—looking for more information in the meeting minutes and not forgetting the meeting. If he’s skimming the email, it’s more likely to get his attention, and he can read the rest for reference.
Since this is just a subtle change in text, it’s less likely that the recipient will feel like you’re yelling, as they might with all caps.
3. Break Emails into Subjects with Headings
Adding titles to your email may sound like sending a novel to your recipient, but that doesn’t mean there should be a ton of information under each one. Doing so helps them get through emails faster if there’s certain information they’re looking for, or they need to refer to later.
By keeping the title in bold and using line breaks between each section, you can create space between each section, making it easier to read—just like any other document.
Using headings is helpful if you have a number of topics you want to cover that separate emails aren’t warranted—for example, daily overview or progress updates.
4. Use Different Formatting for Quotes
If you need to transmit information exactly as someone else wrote it, make subtle changes to the formatting to help differentiate it from your own description. That way there is no confusion as to where your message ends and another begins.
Quotation marks can certainly do the trick, but if you already have a lot of text before and after, it can create a long paragraph that’s less desirable to read and more to pull up information at a glance. is challenging.
Another thing to keep in mind when formatting text in an email, you might want to avoid using too many fonts and colors as it can make the email look unprofessional.
5. Save the questions till the end
Have you ever asked too many questions in an email and probably got half the answers? This can happen in even the smallest of emails or messages.
Try to save your questions till the end and keep them short and to the point. Not only will this help the reader see them, but they also won’t forget what you asked along the way because you’re not presenting any more information later.
What’s more, can they send you a response that clearly answers the questions in the order you asked them.
It may sound silly, but think about all the emails, texts, messages, and digital media that are presented to you every day. It’s easy to get distracted by email overload or that one piece of information is different from another.
Extra Tip—Be Specific in Your Subject Line
This additional tip works for all emails in general. By being specific in your subject line, you’re helping the recipient in many ways—they’ll know what it’s really about, they’ll prioritize it.