Effective Communication:
How to Format a message
Much to
my surprise, one of the questions I hear most frequently is how to make an E-
mail message stand out. How do you make it more attractive? How do you catch the
reader’s eye?
My short
answer is that readers are more attracted to short, concise E- mail than to a
long, drawn-out message regardless of how it is formatted.
That said,
there are tricks you can use to add some splash to your message such as
using spaces and special characters to highlight and make lists etc.
#################
- this
is an example
-here is
another
##################
NOTE: many
e-mail programs allow you to use HTML (the same technology that is used
to build web pages). Since they automate it, you don't need to know much about HTML
other than the fact that I don't think that you should use it.
Spammers
use certain features to track message recipient's, and savvy people will turn
the HTML feature off so that they can only read plain text messages. In fact, in 2004
Microsoft made this the default setting in Microsoft Outlook so that people using Outlook
to read mail would be safer.
Everyone
can read plain text so I recommend using that.
1. Formatting E-mail messages
