Organize Your E-mail Before You Write

Natalie Canavor and Claire Meirowitz

In school, your teachers probably made you create a careful outline of your essays and papers before writing. Here’s the problem: If you haven’t thought through your content and made the decisions suggested in the previous chapters, you’ll find it horrendously hard to organize the material.

But once you’ve thought about goal, audience, and mapping your content, organizing your piece logically becomes a snap.

Suppose you’re writing a memo to introduce your staff to a new system for reporting their work hours.

• Goal—To minimize grumbling and objections to a new system and have staff accept the new way of doing things with reasonable cheerfulness, as well as understand the ...