Getting People to Respond to Your Emails
It is frustrating to send an important email and get no reply. Here are several secrets to writing emails that generate a response.
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Costs of Poor Writing: Wasted Time
Have you ever read something that was so muddled, you had to read it three times before you understood it? Have you ever received a long rambling email and spent ten minutes trying to figure out what the point of it was? Have you ever received a letter or email composed of a solid block
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Do Mistakes Matter?
A bank branch manager recently told about one of her premier bankers. His emails were full of misplaced capitalization, typos, and other glaring errors. When she tried to correct him, he said, “Look, I know my clients. They’re my friends. It doesn’t matter if there are mistakes; they know what I mean.” He had generated a lot of business, but his numbers were falling. Then the manager received a private email from one of the banker’s biggest clients. He wrote, “Please take Mark off my account. If he can’t spell, I don’t believe he can handle our finances.” This was a $5 million account. The client email became part of the banker’s personnel file. He was dismissed soon after.
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The Real Cost of Unclear Messages
In a writing training at a large multinational corporation, I asked, “What are the costs of unclear messages and emails?” I expected answers like, “The wrong work gets done,” and “Operations slow down.” But that’s not what I got. A woman’s hand shot up. “They don’t affect me at all,” she said. She shrugged nonchalantly.
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Clarifying perplexing word pairs: affect/effect, advise/advice
At a corporate training I taught last week, participants asked me to clarify the meaning of the above word pairs. Since these words seem to perplex many people, here are simple definitions. Affect (verb) This word has many meanings in the dictionary. It can refer, as a noun, to one’s emotional state. As a verb,
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