How long is too long for an email?
The fundamental principle of business writing is this: no one wants to read anything. This principle applies to all the writing that you do for work. Those quarterly reports your boss asks you for? She needs them; she doesn’t want to read them. Those meeting minutes? They’re for documentation. No one wants to read them. Those announcements about upcoming work-related events? Same. And your emails to clients, vendors, colleagues? Yep. Those, too.
We have to read at work. That’s how we get our work done. We read those reports to see whether our decisions have paid off or if we need to change our strategy. We read those meeting minutes to remember what got added to our to-do list (and what we can ignore). We read those announcements about upcoming work-related events because–well, free food; that’s it. And all those emails? Those are just the process of doing our jobs.
Email #1: Here’s a task. Response: I’ll get to work on that task.
Email #2: When will said task be completed?
Email #3: Still waiting on said task. Response: Here! Stop harassing me. Email #4: Thanks.
See, the reading and the writing are not the end goal of our work. They are a by product, a means, a mechanism. You didn’t get that degree in aerospace merchandising history because you loved writing. That’s what the what-on-earth-will-you-ever-do-with-an-English degree folks were doing.
And you never imagined you’d have to read–or write–so much.
“The fundamental principle of business writing is this: no one wants to read anything. ”
And you are just like everyone else working away at their jobs, typing at their computers, skimming through the torrent of emails that come in each day.
Our time is limited. Our attention is limited. And so we don’t read every single word (we actually don’t have to, but I’ll save that neuroscience for another post).
We don’t have time for all the words!
And way back in like the 1990s someone promised that the email revolution would eliminate the need for most jobs. Ha! We spend more time emailing than ever before! We are certainly emailing more not emailing less. The average professional writes 40 emails each day and receives 121! And that number has been steadily increasing since email was invented. Here’s a nifty graph projecting how many emails will be sent and received per day in 2025 based on the increases since 2017.
Of course, that’s just email. We haven’t even added up all the messages coming and going to and from a single person in the course of a day–text, social media, slack/teams/google chat, etc. We are inundated by writing (and most of it not that great in terms of quality. How many of the people you communicate with daily have had any training as writers? And yet..they are writing all the time.)
So, how long is too long for an email? As soon as you’ve sent an email, you’ve already contributed to the 121 messages that audience will receive that day. Which is why, for some people, any email is already too much.
Ignoring that fact that any email is already an email we don’t want to read, how much can we count on most people reading?
Think about skimming. We tend to skim down the left side (that’s because English is left to right. If you were skimming, oh, Hebrew, for example, you might skim down the right side since that language is read right to left.).
When we skim, our eyes are on the lookout for a couple of key signals.
One part of your brain is focusing on sentence structure: Subject-Verb-Object. Where are the components that will make an idea make sense?
Another part of your brain is looking at formatting: Where does the paragraph start? Where’s the capital letter? Where’s the period? Are there any other formatting signals that affect how we should hear the words in our heads? All caps? Bold? Italics? Etc.
Another part of your brain is trying to figure out: how does any of this relate to me? What am I supposed to do with this information?
Given all this information, we tend to read the first half of the first line of each paragraph, skimming for sentence structure and relevance to ourselves.
Which means the main goal of any email should be to tell the other person
What the message is about
And how that content relates to them
As quickly
And clearly as possible.
The purpose of email is to communicate the task, question, need, or invitation. Once we start explaining the how or the why, our message will start to get longer than the audience may need or want to read.
A good rule of thumb for an email is to think that if we have to scroll down, the content is too long.
Most of us want to see the end of the email as soon as we open it up. We open the unread email and at a glance, in an instant, determine how much to read. If the message is dense, lots of big paragraphs with any sentences, more text than white space, many of us will think something like “I’ll deal with that later” and immediately exit the message.
But later never comes.
“How does any of this relate to me? What am I supposed to do with this information?”
See, white space, the gaps between the paragraphs, provide an essential signal to the reader. Each white gap shows the reader where a new idea starts. It says, “look here! New idea!”
It all conveys rest and care: you don’t have to search for the important information, I, the writer, have designed the message to take care of you! You can relax and just read down the left side. I will make sure you get the info you need.
Those breaks feel like pauses, breaths, moments when we can digest what we’ve been told and prepare for the next thing. We need breaks. Especially since reading any email is like listening to a person in a conversation. If the email is too long, it’s like the speaker is giving you a lecture and not letting you speak.
All of this is to say that if you find yourself writing a really lengthy email, one that exceeds the size of your computer screen, one that would require the reader to scroll down at least once if not several times, then your message is too long.
If the content is necessary, then think about what you can take out of the email and put in an attachment.
Attachments change the reading experience by changing our expectations. We expect email to be relatively short–not short like a text message or a DM/IM–but certainly not as dense as a report, policy, procedure, form, or other text heavy documents.
We expect reports, policies, procedures, forms, and other things to be text-heavy. That expectation changes our perception about reading, how much time we can expect to spend, how much attention we will give.
This is why the email tells us that the policy has been updated and we are responsible for the changes, but the attachment (or link) contains the complete policy.
This is why the email says “Here’s the report,” but the report is attached.
This is why the email should say, “Here are the steps you need to take to resolve your computer problem,” but the steps with screenshots should be attached.
“If you find yourself writing a really lengthy email, one that exceeds the size of your computer screen, one that would require the reader to scroll down at least once if not several times, then your message is too long.
If the content is necessary, then think about what you can take out of the email and put in an attachment.
”
We differentiate between the types of text because the reader has different expectations about how much content a particular method of communication will contain, how much time it will take to read and understand it, how much attention they need to devote to its content. These differences are often shown through formatting: a report literally looks different from an email. But we don’t have a conscious response to formatting: “oh, this document is formatted as an email, so it should be short and easy to read.” We have an unconscious, visceral response to formatting: “read” or “ugh, no.”
To summarize:
Keep your emails short.
Include white space so the reader can easily skim. Short paragraphs with important information in the first half of the first line of each paragraph as much as possible.
Use attachments or links to help the reader differentiate the requested task from the task’s relevant context and/or instructions, If the central purpose of the email involves something requiring a longer explanation.