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E-mail Architecture |
February 28, 1999 |
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Now what could I possibly mean by E-mail Architecture? Most of the time you click the Reply button and you type in what you want to say. I mean sending an e-mail is simple -- it is meant to be simple! Right? Well yes and no. Operating an e-mail program is meant to be simple, but communicating is never simple, and it is becoming more complex -- and exciting every year. You have two major communication challenges to overcome when sending e-mail.
You are an educator. I do not need to remind you of how busy you are. In all probably, you are corresponding with other educators via e-mail. The opportunities for collaborating, thanks to this new medium, have never been greater. Time has also never been tighter. If you are not receiving 25 or more e-mail messages a day, don't be sad, you will be soon. Frequently, when I am teaching web design to educators, I tell them that, "In the Information Age, it is information that will be competing for attention, in the same way that products compete on the store shelf in the industrial age." If you don't believe this, think about the fact that consumers spent over $9 billion in 1998 by selecting products from web pages. According to Commerce Secretary William Daley, 39% of retailers are now selling on the Net. Now I do not believe that stores will disappear and that we will be forced to squeeze our grapefruit through virtual data gloves. However, it is clear that access to networked information will be, and already is, a major basis for our decision-making. Am I saying that you need to package you e-mail? Well, yes! Your e-mail message is a product. In all likelihood, your audience is looking at 25 or more message subjects and deciding which ones to read, which ones to scan, and which to delete immediately. You are competing for their attention. Following are some simple tips for helping your e-mail messages succeed in communicating:
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The Subject |
In many cases, the subject is the most important part of your message. In a way, it is your advertisement. Your subject is the knock at the door, asking the reader to click and read what you have to say.
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Paragraphs |
Make your paragraphs short. Look at junk mail. Their paragraphs are short with lots of white space between. They do this because they have researched how people read and what people will read, and we do not read long paragraphs. When you open up an e-mail message and see a two page e-mail message that consists of only one paragraph…it looks like work. However, when that e-mail is turned into two and a half pages of very short paragraphs with white space between them, it looks to the mind like less work. Try to keep your paragraphs to less than four sentences or less than six lines.
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Lists |
We list things in our e-mail messages because they are important. We want the reader to know that here are items that they should know about, that they should consider equally. When lists are embedded within a paragraph it is difficult at best to distinguish them cognitively. Seperate your list items with one or two Returns. 
If a list item becomes more than one line, or is likely to be wrapped into more than one line on some e-mail programs, then you should indent the additional lines so that the bullet hangs over all lines. The next section will explain how to do this.
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Accent |
Most e-mail programs do not have bolding or other formatting features designed to accent important parts of your e-mail messages. Even if your program does have these features, you usually can not depend on your audiences having the same capabilities to display your formatting. A good way to draw attention to a specific part or paragraph of your message is to indent it -- create white space to the left of the paragraph in order to draw attention to it. To indent a paragraph so that it will be displayed by any e-mail program, you need to insert four or five spaces in front of each line. Each line must also end with a Return. Now this is easier than it sounds. Here are the steps:
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Headings |
One way of doing this is to create headings or subheadings for your message, a word or phrase that defines the topic and importance of the following paragraph(s). If the heading is flush to the left of the e-mail message, while the following paragraphs are indented, then the headings make perfect Scan Targets as the reader is scrolling down the message. You already know how to do this from the section on accenting.
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Signatures |
In a previous article in From Outside The Box (http://www.landmark-project.com/fotb/signature.html), I explained how to add a signature to your e-mail messages. You must understand that your e-mail messages are information products that, in effect, are competing for attention. Part of the value of your message is based on its author. Be sure to construct and include effective e-mail signatures to your messages. They lend credence to your message and help to place it into context.
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Goals |
You are writing your e-mail message to accomplish something. You compose and craft your text in order to affect the behavior of your audience in some way. When I teach web design to educator, I preach that the goals of their web pages should drive the design. The same is true with e-mail. As you consider the wording that will help you accomplish your goal, you should also consider format. If the design of your web page or the format of your e-mail message helps you accomplish your goal, then it's good design. If I felt comfortable with taking up even more of your time, I would promote the idea that format and design should be part of today's curriculum. At the same time that students are learning to write coherent paragraphs, they should also be learning how to select media and design so that their information products compete for attention. Send some well designed e-mail messages to david@landmark-project.com.
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It is also helpful to indent
and bullet your lists. Since most e-mail programs
do not have bulleting features, you should
substitute a symbol for the bullet. The hyphen is a
commonly used bullet symbol. However, I like using
the lower-case "o", because it is easier to see and
it looks like the standard bullet. I usually
precede the list item with a space, a lower-case
"o", and two more spaces.
If you are writing a long
e-mail message, it is important to consider how
people will be reading it. Research indicates that
when people are using text on a computer screen,
they are more likely to scan the information than
to read it word for word. For this reason, you want
to think about planting Scan
Targets, text that is designed to
draw the scanning eye, to draw attention.
