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Everybody has to write to succeed!

And few of us can get through the day without writing or reviewing email. But typos, poor punctuation, and long, confusing messages are time-consuming and ineffective.

Enhance your professional communication skills by following these quick email tips:

1. Be concise—Time is limited; email is legion. Professional courtesy requires concise content.
2. Frontload—place your most important content at the beginning of your message.
3. Consider unintended audiences. If you can’t post it on a public bulletin board, then don’t send it.
4. Deliver your content with your audience’s needs in mind.
5. Stick to the facts as they relate to your purpose: who, what, where, and when. Consider discussing the why face-to-face.
6. Edit. Edit. Edit.
7. Give drafted email a resting period before sending (2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or even 24 hours when possible).
8. Avoid informal abbreviations (LOL, BTW, etc.).
9. Check your “To” and “Subject” fields and understand the Cc and Bcc electronic email options.
10. Keep it brief. Chunk content into short, topic-specific paragraphs. Send longer content as attached memos, letters, or reports.

Many of my students ask me if they can skip reading the content in the ACT reading tests. These students have already completed 4-6 reading passages using the Short Summary Exercise strategy I taught them, but they’re still struggling to finish the reading passages within the 35-minute time limit. They’re ready to try anything.

It sounds counterintuitive, right? How can students answer questions about content they haven’t read? But I always focus on helping students find the strategies that work for them, so I had  students try a variation of the questions-first approach, and guess what:

The Questions-First Approach can work!

When  completing the ACT Social Science and Natural Science passages, some students did impprove their time and accuracy using the questions-first approach.

Here’s the step-by-step map for the strategy that worked for some students who were taking the Social Science and Natural Science passages of ACT Sample Reading Tests:

• Quickly skim the preface (the short introduction that precedes each passage) and introductory paragraph for some quick clues about content.
• Now scan the questions, looking for the querries that refer to specific paragraphs. Try to answer these questions by reading the referenced paragraph.
• Next, go to the questions that refer to specific line numbers and attempt to answer these questions.
• Address any remaining questions in sequence, skimming the unread content as needed to address each.

Try this approach on 2-4 Social Science and Natural Science reading passages (this strategy hasn’t been as effective on the Prose and Humanities passages). Be sure to time yourself for each passage (you have about 8 minutes and 45 seconds for each passage, 35 minutes total) so that you can compare your speed and accuracy with results from passages that you processed before applying this approach.  If your speed and accuracy have improved, then consider using this strategy on the Social Science and Natural Science passaages as you take the official test. Good Luck!

Let me know how this approach works for you, and contact me at jhampel@justwritecopy.com if you have any questions.