Plan Your Emails

Introduction to This Email Writing Training

You want to write email quickly and easily, and you want to write high-quality, professional email. You can do both. The key to writing clear, professional email quickly and easily is planning.

Stay in the planning mindset until you’re ready to write. When you’re planning, you can think about the big picture. You can see what you want and how you’re going to get it. Once you start writing, you’re into the sentences and words mindset. You can’t plan when you’re focused on writing clear sentences using the right words. Stay in the planning mindset until you’re sure you have the entire email plotted out.

This lesson explains the procedure you should go through to plan your email. Of course, if you’re writing back and forth to a co-worker with two or three sentences in each email, you’ll do less planning—but you still must plan.

Plan Your Email: Activities

Practice planning your emails by preparing the plans for two emails that will be a half-page to one-page long. Go through the procedure as explained here without shortcuts. You will see that planning the email makes writing it easier.

Follow this procedure:

1. Know what you want from the reader before beginning to decide on what to send. Write only what will get the response.
2. Write notes to guide you as you write.
3. Check the notes to be sure you have only what the reader needs.
4. Check to be sure you have everything the reader needs.
5. Organize the notes.