Use Gemini to Rewrite Emails

Contributed by: Thomas Nield

Difficulty level: Easy

No matter what your job role is nowadays, from a car mechanic to a software engineer, almost everybody has to write emails. It has become one of the main modes of communication in conducting business. However, putting things in email can sometimes be hard to get right. We may want to convey a certain tone or have trouble choosing the right words to get the response we want. Rather than hemming and hawing, we can use Gemini to expedite writing an email.

Let’s say I am a brusque senior software developer always under a heavy workload and therefore a bit impatient. My manager tells me to be easier on the new guy they just hired. He’s a fresh college grad with a data science background but is pivoting into more of a software engineering role. The manager says there is some expected skill gap and to mentor him.

Being overly busy with sprint deadlines, my first impulse would be to send a blunt and “to-the-point” email like this:

Hey, you just committed code to the production branch that was full of bugs, failed unit tests, and would have practically crashed our server. You have to do better than this!

Of course, in person I could say this in a much calmer and gentler tone. But the thing about email is it doesn’t convey tone well, and this could be read as practically yelling. Not wanting to spend 15 minutes belaboring a diplomatically worded email, I can turn to Gemini for help. Let’s ask it to rewrite ...