Focus
Avoid distractions in your text by being coherent
Before we start, please do this small exercise. Below are the first six words of each paragraph of this email. Can you grasp the core of what I am talking about?
Focus on your writing is essential…
Readers want to know the topic…
Make the exercise of reading the…
After setting the focus, it is…
Coherence through all the passage is…
Focus on emails are important because…
If you make clear to the reader…
Hopefully you do and I passed the exercise I propose in this email. Let’s see.
Focus on your writing is essential for effective communication. Knowledge workers read things all day. On different subjects, at different places, in different contexts. It is important to help your readers know what you are talking about from the beginning.
Start focused
Readers want to know the topic of a block of text in the first sentence. Be it an email, a long commit message, a paragraph in a longer essay. And they want to know it early on in the sentence.
Make the exercise of reading the first six words of each paragraph. That’s what I did above. If it is not enough to grasp what the whole text is about, you should improve it.
Stay focused
After setting the focus, it is important to keep it. Your next sentences and paragraphs should always be building upon the core topic in a logical sequence.
Coherence through all the passage is what guarantees that your message is well transmitted. Especially in emails. I mentioned before the limit of one question per email. The superset of this rule is that each email should have just one topic.
Focus on emails are important because often people want to consciously or unconsciously diverge from an important topic. If you provide distractions in your text, an evasive reader will gladly take that chance to avoid addressing your point.
If you make clear to the reader what you are talking about from the first sentence, then keep your writing logically connected to that topic throughout all the text, your reader won't have much room to get lost.
