How to Improve Your Daily Communication

You’re reading an excerpt of Great Founders Write, by Ben Putano, writer, entrepreneur, and book publisher. He’s the founder of Damn Gravity Media, a publishing house that inspires and educates tomorrow’s great founders. Purchase now for lifetime access to the book and on-demand video course.

Let’s talk about the most common form of writing in your work today: email.

It’s easy to take emails for granted. They’re so routine that we don’t even think about them as writing. They’re just busywork—something we do. But because emails are so ubiquitous, small improvements in the way we write them can make a massive difference over time.

Think about these three email subject lines. What do they have in common?

Subject: Updated health insurance policy

Subject: All-hands meeting this afternoon—urgent

Subject: We’re being acquired

Not much, right? Number one is pretty mundane, number two seems to imply an existential crisis, and the last one is exhilarating or terrifying, depending on your equity package.

But the fundamental purpose of each email is the same: to inform the reader of something important.

The vast majority of our writing as founders is basic communication. The sharing of information. It’s always been this way, dating all the way back to the invention of writing as a record-keeping system. But today, sharing information is almost too easy, and this has made our writing sloppy. Emails are often disorganized and full of unnecessary details, and they fail to answer our reader’s most pressing question: “What does this information mean for me?”

The internet has given us infinite space to write, but now we’re constrained by an even more limited resource: our reader’s attention span.

When writing to inform, being organized is critical. You need to lead with the most important information and leave zero ambiguity about what it means. Cut any extraneous information or save it until the end. This is not the time to lead with an “interesting” backstory or wax poetically about your company’s mission.

Never forget the cardinal rule when writing to inform: get to the point.

Here’s a real example of an internal email that plagues thousands of businesses around the world (names have been changed to protect the guilty):

Subject: Product meeting

Hi all,

Been a wild day. Andrew from XYZ Ventures just put a meeting on my calendar for this afternoon. I’ll need the pitch deck updated by 2 so I have time to review and rehearse a bit. Obviously the product meeting is a blocker now. Let me know what you’d like to do.

-B

—

Boss McFounder

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Imagine you’re the Head of Product for this company. Do you know what to make of this email? What does Boss McFounder want you to do, exactly? Should you change the meeting time or have it without him? And why is he telling you about the pitch deck? You’re not responsible for that.

It’s obvious this founder did not consider the purpose of his email. Instead of organizing his thoughts, he wrote it as a pure stream-of-consciousness, leaving everyone confused and unsure what to do next.

How would you fix this message?