Never Judge a Book By Its Cover, But People Still Do

Back in 2016, I used to volunteer at a startup non-profit educational organization and worked really closely with the Executive Director.

During that time, my main task was to schedule interviews with potential college student interns and other people who are interested in volunteering. Once they come in, the Executive Director takes over.

I saw him do plenty of interviews, and one of the things I learned from working with the Executive Director was the importance of attention to detail. Whenever he interviewed candidates, he would always tell them (and I'm paraphrasing),

"...If you have these tiny mistakes on your resume, your prospective employer will think you don't pay enough attention to detail and you're not right for the job. And then what happens? Your resume's in the garbage."

Unfortunately, that's human reality. We meet someone, form a first impression within the first seven seconds, and then judge them based on that short interaction.

Sounds ridiculous right?

But people still rely on it as a way to quickly decide if they should continue spending time with someone or not, even if their first impression is completely wrong.

And you bet people do that with your emails.

You can send out the greatest email content of all time, but if your emails look ugly, like a big, fat block of text, you can kiss your readers' attention goodbye and consider your email unread (Or probably in the trash).

The point is, the way your email looks is just as important as your content.

So do your readers a favor, and give them a pleasant, eye strain-less reading experience.

Keep your paragraphs short, it makes your email look less intimidating to read.

Use bullet points to make your ideas easily digestible.

Keep the scholarly vocabulary to a minimum so your readers don't have to read your emails with a dictionary next to them.