1. Subject Lines
Factoids
The first email was sent in 1971 by an engineer called Ray Tomlinson. He sent it to himself and it contained the memorable message: qwertyuiop. However, several other people are also claimed to have sent the first message.
If every email that is sent in one day was printed, each on one sheet of A4, two and a half million trees would have to be cut down. If all the printed emails were piled up on top of each other, they would be more than three times the height of Everest and they would weigh more than the entire human population of Canada. If the printed sheets were laid out they would cover a surface area equivalent to two million football pitches. The cost of printing them would be equivalent to Spains Gross Domestic Product for an entire yeararound 1.4 billion dollars.
Although the most common Internet activity is emailing, a Digital Life worldwide survey found that people actually spend more time on social media (4.6 hours per week, against 4.4 for email).
The term drailing was coined in the mid-2000s and means emailing while drunk.
1.1 What's the buzz?
1)
Look at your Inbox in your email account. Analyse 10-20 subject lines and decide some criteria for judging how effective the subject lines are. Compare your criteria with a colleague's.
2)
Look in your Spam. Again, analyse some of the subject lines (without opening the mail itself!). What style do most of them have in common? How do you know that they are spam?
3)
Finally, look at some of the subject lines that you have written. Do they match your criteria from Exercise 1? In some cases, might your recipient have thought that the email was spam?
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It may seem unusual to have an entire chapter dedicated to subject lines, but more than 250 billion are written every day. Subject lines are crucial in motivating your recipient to open your email and to respond quickly, rather than setting it aside for future reading.
The subject line of an email is like the title of the paper. If readers do not find the title of a paper interesting, they are unlikely to read the rest of the paper. Likewise, if your subject line is not relevant in some way to the recipient, they may decide simply to delete your email.
British journalist Harold Evans once wrote that writing good headlines is 50 per cent of text editors skills . The same could be said of the subject line of an email.
In this chapter you will learn how to write a subject line that will
be easily recognizable and distinguishable from other emails in your recipients inbox
prompt your recipient to want to know more and thus to open your mail
help establish a personal connection with your recipient
summarize the content of the email so that your recipient will know what to expect even before reading the contents of the mail
1.2 Write the subject line imagining that you are the recipient
Think from the recipients perspective. I lecture in scientific English, and I receive an incredible number of emails from students who use the words English course as their subject line. From their point of view, an English course is something very specific in their lifeit is only 2 hours a week as opposed to their research and studies which probably take up over 40 hours. So for them, English course is very meaningful. But from my point of view, the reverse is true. English courses take up a big part of my week. So the subject line English course is not helpful for me at all. A more meaningful subject line would be Civil Engineers English course or English course 10 October .
So, as with the title of a paper, your subject line needs to be as specific as possible.
In many cases the recipient will be doing you a favor if he / she decides to open your emailyour job as the sender is to make this favor worthwhile.
1.3 Combine your subject line with the preview pane
Most email systems display not only the subject line but also make the first few words visible too. It may be useful to use the first words as a means to encourage the recipient to open your email straight away, rather than delaying reading it or deleting it forever.
Using Dear + title (e.g., Dr, Professor) + persons name as your first words may help to distinguish your email from spam, as spammed mails do not usually incorporate peoples titles.
If you adopt this tactic, then it is a good idea to keep your subject line as short as possible. If you can include any key words in the first few words, that too will have a positive influence on the recipient.
1.4 Use the subject line to give your complete message
Some people, me included, use the subject line to give our complete message. This saves the recipient from having to open the email. A typical message to my students might be: Oct 10 lesson shifted to Oct 17. Usual time and place. EOM.
EOM stands for End of message and signals to the recipient that the complete message is contained within the subject line and that they dont have to open the email. If you dont write EOM, recipients will not know whether they need or do not need to open the message.
1.5 Consider using a two-part subject line
Some people like to divide their subject line into two parts. The first part contains the context, the second part the details about this context. Here are some examples:
XTC Workshop: postponed till next year
EU project: first draft of review
1.6 Be specific, never vague
A vague subject title such as Meeting time changed is guaranteed to annoy most recipients. They want to know which meeting, and when the new time is. Both these details could easily be contained in the subject line.
Project C Kick Off meeting new time 10.30, Tuesday 5 September
This means that a week later when perhaps your recipients have forgotten the revised time of the meeting, they can simply scan their inbox, without actually having to open any mails.
1.7 Include pertinent details for the recipient
If your recipient knows someone who knows you, then it is not a bad idea to put the name of this common acquaintance in the subject line. This alerts the recipient that this is not a spam message. For example, lets imagine you met a certain Professor Huan at a conference. Huan recommended that you write to a colleague of his, Professor Wilkes, for a possible placement in Professor Wilkes' lab. Your subject line for your email to Professor Wilkes could be:
Prof Huan. Request for internship by engineering PhD student from University of X
Sometimes it might be useful to include the place where you met the recipient. For example:
XTC Conf. Beijing. Request to receive your paper entitled: name of paper
1.8 Examples of subject lines
Here are some more examples of subject lines. The words in italics are words that you would need to change.
Attaching a manuscript for the first time to a journal where you have never published before:
Paper submission: title of your paper
Attaching revised manuscript to a journal where your paper has already been accepted subject to revisions: