Peer to Peer Magazine

Tips on How To Improve Your Writing THE WORD ON WORDS To conclude our four-part series about email, we begin at the end. When To Quit Does this email thread look familiar? We' ll talk again at the meeting on Tuesday. You bet, looking forward to it. Me too. Take care. Have a nice weekend. And you. Will do. Alright. Okay. Some people still do this. If you are one, I speak for everyone who knows you: Please stop. When the other person emails, "I will make sure that gets filed on Tuesday," do not reply unless you have new information, a suggestion or a request. This brings me to the most ubiquitous email in the universe: "Thanks!" Reconsider sending this one-word message. How To Say Goodbye To impress your business associates with your capability, your aention to detail and your caring, take it right up to the end by keeping your sign-off crisp and friendly. Instead of: "Please do not hesitate to let me know if you have any questions or need further clarification." first, drop "do not hesitate to"; it means nothing; same for "any." Second, remove the repetition: we ask questions because we need clarification; if we need clarification, we ask questions. Third, put the conditional clause at the beginning of the sentence: "If you have questions, please let me know." Then fit your signature to the email's tone: "Best regards," "Kind regards," or "Warm regards." Or just "Best," or just "Regards." "Till then" works. I would like to see us resurrect "Sincerely." It's a nice word. My agent Richard signs, "Be well." I like that, too. Probably the best is just your name. Why To Proofread To avoid accidentally sending off an embarrassingly rough dra, you have le the "To:" line blank. (See: "Guess Who's Coming to Email (Act II of IV)"). Do not fill it in and hit "Send" until you have proofread. And make sure you read what is there, not what you think is there. This is the bane of everyone who writes: we get too close to our work to see what we have wrien. Consider this sentence from an email I recently received: "I did not received no complaints before we switched to the new program." Let me see if I can figure out what the writer meant to write and how he ended up writing something so obviously ignorant and unlike anything you or I would ever want to send to a client or a colleague. He was an incredibly busy guy, distracted, and he made only half the edits he intended: "receive" became "received" and "any" became "no"; then he hit "Send." Does this sound familiar? Of course, I have no way of knowing for sure, but that's what I suspect happened. The lesson: No maer how many times you have already proofread the message, proof it one more time before you fill in the "To:" line and hit "Send." Your best friend might not care, but your client and potential clients, your boss and your colleagues will care, and they will judge you by the errors in your email. And, yes, one more time, the chorus: DO NOT RELY ON SPELL CHECKERS. "Rental" and "renal" are both spelled correctly. You can imagine the rich possibilities: "AAA Aardvark Renal Equipment, specializing in augers." P2P Gone with the Email (Act IV of IV) by Gary Kinder GARY KINDER Gary Kinder is a lawyer and New York Times best-selling author. He has taught over 1,000 writing programs for the American Bar Association and for law firms and corporate law departments around the country. He is also the creator of WordRake, the clear and concise editing software, which Harvard Law School recently recognized as "Disruptive Innovation." Contact Gary at garyk@wordrake.com. 72 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2017

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