Most workplace writing fails for a dull reason: the reader cannot tell what they are meant to do with it. They open an email, scan the first two lines, find a wall of context with no ask, and quietly move it to "later" - a folder that, as you know, is where messages go to die. The fix is not better vocabulary. It is putting the point where people actually look.
Bottom line up front
Borrowed from military briefing and adopted by anyone who values their colleagues' time, BLUF means you state the conclusion and the request in the first sentence, then explain underneath. "I need sign-off on the venue by Thursday or we lose the booking" tells the reader everything in fourteen words. The reasoning, the alternatives, the budget breakdown - all of that belongs below, for the people who want it. Write the way a journalist writes a news story, with the headline first and the detail tapering off, so that someone who reads only the opening line still knows what you want. This single habit will do more for your reputation as a clear thinker than any amount of polished prose, because busy people equate clarity with competence, and they are usually right to.
Plain English beats clever English
Cut the throat-clearing. "I am writing to inform you that the meeting has been moved" is a slow way of saying "The meeting has moved to 3pm." Prefer short Anglo-Saxon words over long Latinate ones - "use" not "utilise", "help" not "facilitate", "about" not "with regard to". Drop the qualifiers that hedge everything into mush. Read your draft aloud, and anywhere you stumble, the sentence is too long; break it.
Subject lines do real work
A subject line is a promise about the contents. "Quick question" promises nothing and gets buried. "Approval needed: training budget, reply by Fri" tells the reader the action, the topic and the deadline before they have opened anything. Treat it as the most important sentence you write, because for half your readers it is the only one they will read.
One thing worth saying plainly - shorter is almost always better, but not always. A redundancy notice or a difficult bit of feedback needs room to breathe and a careful tone; compressing it to a bullet point reads as cold. Match the length to the weight of the message. A few rules that hold up:
- If your email runs past five sentences, ask whether it should be a call instead.
- Put the deadline in bold so it survives a fast scroll.
- One email, one ask. Bundling three requests guarantees you get answers to one.
Send fewer words. People will thank you, mostly by replying faster.