I have followed (sometimes loosely) the five sentence email rule that may have originally been documented by Guy Kawasaki. I’ve gone so far as to include a reference in the signature block of my personal email.

Now David Silverman at Harvard Business Publishing has outlined ten (mostly) sensible ways to make your emails more readable. Some of his suggestions, like deleting redundancies and making sure you provide context are good reminders. His recommendation that you wait up to a day before sending an email doesn’t seem to have much practical application and while I haven’t counted the number of revisions this piece has gone through, I feel safe in estimating it hasn’t undergone the 30-50 revisions he proposes some emails receive.

Perhaps I’ve missed something.