In a conversation, there is some minimum of shared context. You might be in the same physical location, and even on the phone you have, at minimum, commonality of time. When you generate a document on paper, usually there is some context embedded in the medium: the text is in the proceedings of a conference, written on a birthday card, handed to your professor with a batch of Econ 101 term papers, or presented in a contract to your buyer or seller.

With email, you can't assume anything about a sender's location, time, frame of mind, profession, interests, or future value to you. This means, among other things, that you need to be very, very careful about giving your receivers some context. That's why you'll need specific strategies for doing so.

Useful Subject Lines

A subject line that pertains clearly to the email body will help people mentally shift to the proper context before they read your message. The subject line should be brief (as many mailers will truncate long subject lines), does not need to be a complete sentence, and should give a clue to the contents of the message. For example:

Subject: home inspection scheduled for Tuesday

Chris - The buyers have scheduled the home inspection for 3:00 this Tuesday afternoon, if that is all right with your seller.

Here the subject line summarizes nicely the most important details of the message.

If your message is in response to another piece of email, your email software will probably preface the subject line with Re: or RE: (for REgarding). If your email composition software doesn't do this, it would be polite to put in RE: by hand.

Subject: Re: home inspection

Pat - Tuesday at 3:00 is fine. Please let me know immediately if there is any finding which may alter the contract.

For time-critical messages, starting with URGENT: is a good idea (especially if you know the person gets a lot of email):

Subject: URGENT: home inspection must be rescheduled

Chris - The buyer must leave town on a business trip and asks if the inspection can be rescheduled for the following day, Wednesday at 4:00.

For requests, starting with REQ: can signal that action is needed:

Subject: REQ: Closing date has been set

The closing date for the home at 3414 St. John's Place has been set for 2:00 p.m. at Chicago Title Company on Preston Road. If you or your agent can not attend, please let me know immediately as it is the end of the month and available closing times are almost booked up.

If you are offering non-urgent information that requires no response from the other person, prefacing the subject line with FYI: (For Your Information) is not a bad idea, as in

Subject: FYI: donuts in break room

The donut fairy left a dozen doughnuts in the break room. First come, first served!

Information, Please

Do yourself a favor and eliminate the word "information" from your subject lines (and maybe from the body of your message as well). When I was the webmaster for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I got a lot of email that looked like this:

Subject: information

Please send me information about UIUC.

This gave me very little clue as to what the person wanted to know about: admissions application deadlines? The number of students? The acreage? The number of buildings? Was I supposed to send paper documents or give URLs? The only thing I could do with email like this was ask for further context. Mail like this would have been much better as:

Subject: UIUC history

Are there any Web pages about the history of the U of I?

Giving a subject line helps your email be more effective. Not only will it be read by your recipient more quickly, it will be answered more promptly.

Published: September 20, 1999

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

"Ducky Sherwood's Effective Email" Kaitlin Duck Sherwood has been using electronic mail since 1974. She has also written email software, including one of the first web-based interfaces to email. In 1994, she published A Beginner's Guide to Electronic Mail on the Web to popular acclaim. Volunteers have since translated the guide into German, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), and Indonesian. She has also published a book titled Managing Your Email Inbox that shows how to deal with email overload.