Resource of the Week #145: Writing Email That Gets Answered

Hello again. This week’s resource is one that I learned of through a connection on LinkedIn. It deals with a way that many of us communicate internationally: by email.

Sometimes members of the AuthorAID community complain that they send email to prominent researchers and don’t hear back. Unfortunately, there’s no way to guarantee a reply. However, how you write your message can affect the likelihood of a response.

Advice in this regard appears in a piece titled “How to Get Busy People to Take Action When You Send an Email”. Here’s a summary of the main advice:

• Keep your email message short and focused.
• State your request early in the message.
• If a message has multiple parts, divide it into sections.
• “Write to one person at a time”, rather than sending mass emails.
• Write a compelling subject line.
• Send messages at times of day when recipients are unlikely to neglect them.
• Follow up (nicely) if people don’t respond.

Some of the advice might be more appropriate for sending email to North American or European researchers than for doing so to researchers in some other parts of the world. But much of the advice seems widely applicable. I encourage you to look at this resource.

Until the next post—

Barbara