Email Writer

About the Email Writer

The hard part of an email is almost never the words. It is deciding what the email is actually for, and then resisting everything that gets in the way of saying it: the paragraph of context nobody needs, the apology for writing at all, the request buried politely in the fourth sentence where it can be missed.

Describe the situation here and you get a draft with the ask in the first paragraph. Seven kinds are on offer, and each carries its own rules about what makes that kind of email work. A request has to be easy to say yes to: what, by when, and why it is reasonable. A follow-up gets one short reminder of what it is about and then the ask again, with no guilt and no third apology for chasing. A refusal says no in the first two lines, gives one honest reason, and does not leave the door ambiguously open, which is the kindest way to decline and the hardest to write. An apology takes responsibility once and moves to what happens next, rather than performing contrition at length in a way that makes the reader console you.

The subject line comes first in the output and is written to say what the email is about, since "Quick question" and "Touching base" tell an inbox nothing and are the reason a message sits unopened for three days.

Facts are held to what you give it. No invented dates, amounts, names or shared history. Where the brief leaves out a detail the email needs, a bracketed placeholder goes in so that it is obvious what to fill rather than plausible enough to send by accident.

One small thing it will never do, on explicit instruction: begin by hoping the email finds you well.

Read the draft before you send it. It is a first draft written by something that has never met the recipient, which is a fine place to start and a poor place to stop.

How to use it

1. 1Describe what the email needs to do, including anything the recipient already knows.
2. 2Pick the kind — a request, a refusal, a follow-up, an apology and so on. This changes the structure, not just the wording.
3. 3Choose a length. Three lines is right far more often than people expect.
4. 4Put your name in the sign-off box so you do not have to edit it afterwards.
5. 5Fill in every bracketed placeholder, read it once as the recipient, and send it.

Questions

Will the recipient be able to tell?

If you send the draft unedited, quite possibly — generated email has a recognisable evenness to it. The fix is small: cut a sentence, use a contraction, and add the one specific detail only you would know. That last is what makes a message read as written by a person.

Can it reply to an email I paste in?

Yes. Choose the reply kind and paste the message you are answering along with a line about what you want to say. It will answer each question the original asked rather than restating the thread back at them.

Why are there square brackets in my draft?

Because the brief did not supply something the email needs — a date, a figure, a name. They are deliberately conspicuous. Inventing a plausible date that you then fail to notice would be far worse than a gap you cannot miss.

Is it any good at saying no?

It is instructed carefully on it, because a refusal is the kind of email people most want help with and most often get wrong. The refusal goes in the first two lines, gets one honest reason, and is not softened into a maybe. Check that before sending: an ambiguous no produces a second conversation.