Want to Get Better at Writing? Start With Your Emails

Looking through glasses as a metaphor for improving email writing

Want to get better at writing? Start with your emails.

This article is part of our Life at Work Series — where we explore the practices, challenges, and lessons that shape our professional lives.

It is also part of our Customer Service Series — reflections and lessons on how service is designed, delivered, and experienced, from Frontline conversations to leadership choices.

How This Article Helps

Whether you’re emailing a Customer, Colleague, or Stakeholder — email is one of your most-used communication tools.

But the quality of your emails could be helping or hurting how others perceive you.

That’s not just a Customer Service issue. It’s a business issue.

Email Writing Isn’t Just for Customers

In the past, the training request we’d receive would sound like this:

We have a big Customer Service Team. Please help them improve their email writing skills.

These days, I hear a new variation on this request — particularly from global and regional leadership. It sounds like this:

“We want to improve our email writing with Customers. That’s an obvious goal.

But we also want to improve how people in our organization write to each other.

To build a Customer-centric culture and our organizational effectiveness, we want everybody to write well — it’s that important to us.”

That’s the single biggest trend I’ve seen in email writing classes — and I think it’s a terrific one.

The Two Most Critical Skills for Managers

I read a piece by Maurice Fitzgerald on the two most critical skills for Managers — and it hit home.

“We can have all the knowledge in the world. Unless we are able to communicate it effectively, we can’t get anything done.”

The only ways we can get our Teams and Organizations to do what we want are:

Writing
Speaking

There is nothing else, there is no other way we can communicate. There is no other way we can get things done.

Since Maurice knows I train these skills, he asked me if I had any quick suggestions on how folks can improve their writing.

Here’s what came to mind.

Get Better at Writing — Start with Your Emails

It’s unlikely the people reading this are planning on writing the next great American, Malaysian, or Irish novel.

For most people at work, it’s about increasing clarity and effectiveness in written communication.

So to get better at writing, I’d suggest starting off by improving how you write emails.

Because nearly everyone has to write emails.

Yet, as is probably your experience too, the quality and clarity of email writing out there is all over the place.

Want a Customer-Centric Culture?

If you truly want to build that desirable Customer-centric culture, then everyone should be able to write as if they were writing to a Customer.

And after all, isn’t another Colleague your Customer too?

Why would you write differently to a Colleague than you would to a Client or Customer?

Doesn’t your Colleague deserve clarity? Don’t they deserve ease or recognition of their emotion?

And the way you write is a direct reflection of how you think and how you see the world.

What Business Writing Has Done to Us

One of the hallmarks of a great email is that it sounds the way we speak — when we speak as our best selves.

When we’re thinking of someone else.

Yet we still see emails filled with heavy language, lengthy expressions and outdated phrases like “We regret to inform you…” — the kind of writing that hides meaning rather than clarifies it.

Some participants tell us they learned to write this way in school — often under the heading of ‘business writing’.

Oh dear.

When business writing refers to being murky in word choice and stilted in how we present our ideas and suggestions — I’d say that’s an approach to business writing that’s not doing anyone any favours.

It’s a strange world we live in when a chatbot ends up having more personality and better word choice than a human being does.

Some Lenses

This short article isn’t a replacement for a formal workshop or learning program. There’s just too much ground to cover when it comes to better writing.

But there are a number of great lenses you can use to review and improve your existing email writing.

I use the term lens deliberately.

What I find is that people look at their email, but don’t always ‘see’ their email.

A structured lens can provide you with a new and powerful way to relook (and rethink) how you write.

My Three Favorite Email Lenses

Here are three of my favorite lenses — practical tools that help people re-see and improve their writing.

Lens #1: The 9 Step Pattern

A clear and repeatable structure for responding to emails.

This is the essential pattern we teach in our email writing workshops and we cover these steps:

Interpret Tone & Content
Choose the right Response Action (Clarify, Response Template, Free Form)
Write the Opening
Craft the Affirmation or Empathy Statement
Structure the Response
Invite Interaction
Conclude
Re-read
Send

Having a chronological, step-by-step framework makes email writing both better and more efficient.

And the 9 Step Pattern ensures that the tone and content of the Customer have been considered and, where appropriate, matched.

Like a great recipe, it helps make sure all the key ingredients are there.

Lens #2: The Customer Experience Pyramid

Three questions that guide tone, clarity and emotional impact.

The CX Pyramid is so simple and yet so powerful. It’s part of our CX workshops and we often use the CX Pyramid in our Mystery Shopper and Contact Audit work for Clients as well.

The pyramid covers three levels — each with its own question to answer.

Meets Needs — Did I help my Customer accomplish their goal?
Easy — Did I make it easy for the Customer to understand and use my reply?
Enjoyable — What kind of emotional perception will be left in the mind of the Customer once they read my email reply? Is that the emotion I was going for?

Considering the answers to these three questions as you write is pretty much guaranteed to make your email better.

Lens #3: The Customer Journey Approach

Thinking beyond the reply — what comes before and after.

This lens helps remind me that the Customer is on a journey to accomplish something. And that I’m just one point in that journey.

By stepping back and looking at the bigger chronological picture I can serve them better.

And here are the questions I ask myself using this lens:

What prompted this person to write to us in the first place? (the before)
What do they need from me in this specific email? (the during)
Where are they likely to go next — and how can I help them with that step? (the after)

Sometimes people get very factory-like when they’re handling email.

Head down, fingers flying, responses sent.

But taking a few moments to consider what motivated them to write, what their goal is, and where they are likely to go next leads to better outcomes.

That can include fewer back-and-forth email trains and a better Customer experience.

More Lenses?

Absolutely.

You can layer on other lenses too — like the Cultural Lens (How does a German Customer expect a message vs. a Japanese Customer?) or the Values Lens (Do your communications reflect your company’s values?).

But I’d still start with the 9 Step Pattern — because it gives an approach we can make our own.