By Dees Stallings

E-mail is the fastest, most convenient and cost-effective means of communicating in writing today. What does that mean to us in a government workplace? It means:

• We write more today than in yesterday's paper-based environment.
• Our writing is read by more people, from more varied backgrounds.
• Our writing is less routine, demanding more thought in composing.
• The ease of composing and sending messages is unprecedented.

These trends and others make our writing at once more valuable and more risky. This column is about reducing risk and increasing value of your e-mail communications.

To Minimize Risk, Put Your Bottom Line Up Front

You're looking at the morning's twenty or more messages, wondering how many need to be answered before noon. As usual, 25% to 50%: 1) have no subject line, 2) have the mystifying but popular subject line RE:____, or 3) a subject line so general ("In Touch," "Your Message," "Meeting") it takes an intelligence analyst to predict what will follow.

A significant time-waster for busy workers who must respond to increasing volumes of e-mail messages daily is the missing or unhelpful subject line. Sending an e-mail with a missing or misleading subject line is to risk having your message delayed, misfiled, or even deleted.

One solution: a commonsense "dress code" for safe e-mail, starting with the subject line. Klaus Kleinfeld, Siemens CEO, recently stated in Forbes, "We're starting to train our people in a few simple rules. I don't want to see an e-mail that doesn't have a subject line. I want to know if a decision needs to be made and whether it's urgent."

Near-Catastrophic Corrections

I recently was racing to send messages out to a number of people I needed to e-mail separately; I also needed to use their names in the body of the message. Using my common practice of running each message through the spell-checker before pushing Send, the names of two people mentioned in the messages, Feekes and Gilbert, were changed to "Feces" and "Giblet." In my haste to complete the task, I almost pushed the Send button.

Keep your spell-checker under control. More on this in later columns.

Knuckle Down On Your E-Mail

Problem: Readability studies show that paragraphs become hard to read when they're more than 7-10 lines of standard one-column text. Readers get lost in blocks of text, and the meaning of important messages becomes foggy, slowing progress and making our information-intensive workplace risky. Why?

The reason is that writers often do not "package" their ideas. When messages present readers with short, readable, and focused paragraphs, understanding is streamlined. Focus means that you cover only one main point in each of your paragraphs in the body of the message. When you do this, your reader can follow your message without having to worry about where one part of your discussion starts and ends.

One Solution: In general, try to make your paragraphs in e-mail messages no more than 7-10 lines.

A Quick Method For Checking Paragraph Length: The One-Knuckle Technique.

To save time, use your knuckle to measure the length of a paragraph. For most of us, our knuckle covers about 7-10 lines. Short, focused paragraphs should be the norm, since a strength of e-mail is its ability to get information quickly to those who need it.

Readers Respond

Among recent reader responses, that of Don Ragland, a technical writer at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM., stands out. He says, ". . . maintaining certain, well-established language standards in email not only conveys my meaning more clearly but also reflects positively on the intellectual intent behind my words."

Don is correct. When we set and maintain standards for communications for both humans and technology, we safeguard the online environment where we increasingly work and live.

Dees Stallings' column will focus on safer and more efficient e-mail for government and business. Contact him with your questions at safeemail@pubsector.net.

Dr. Dees Stallings is Managing Director and Chief Learning Officer of High Stakes Writing, LLC, (www.highstakeswriting.com) where he focuses on safer and more efficient e-mail for government and business. Dr. Stallings was chief of the Army Communicative Skills Office in the Center for Army Leadership, Command and General Staff College, which manages all Army training in writing, speaking, reading, listening, memory, and reasoning. Before that he was Director of a 400-person telecommunications training department (Switching Department) at the Army Signal Center, Fort Gordon, GA, where he also wrote the installation's Information Systems Plan.