UNDERSTANDING E-MAIL. E-mail is so common and informal that writers sometimes forget its professional side. Though usually composed quickly, e-mails have a long shelf life once they’re archived. They can also spread well beyond their original audiences. So you need to take care with messages sent to organizations, businesses, professors, groups of classmates, and so on. The following strategies will help.

Explain your purpose clearly and logically. Use both the subject line and first paragraph of an e-mail to explain your reason for writing. Be specific about names, titles, dates, places, expectations, requirements, and so on, especially when your message announces an event, explains a policy, invites a discussion, or makes an inquiry. Write your message so that it will still make sense a year or more later.

Tell readers what you want them to do. In a professional e-mail, lay out a clear agenda for accomplishing one major task: Ask for a document, a response, or a reply by a specific date. If you have multiple requests to make of a single person or group, consider writing separate e-mails. It’s easier to track short, single-purpose e-mails than to deal with complex documents requiring several different actions.

Write for intended and unintended audiences. The specific audience in the “To” line is usually the only audience for your message. But e-mail is more public than traditional surface mail, easily duplicated and sent to whole networks of recipients with just a click. So compose your business e-mails as if they might be read by everyone in a unit or even published in a local paper. Assume that nothing in business e-mail is private.

Keep your messages brief. Lengthy blocks of e-mail prose without paragraph breaks irritate readers. Indeed, meandering or chatty e-mails in business situations can make a writer seem disorganized and out of control. Try to limit your e-mail messages to what fits on a single screen. Remember that people routinely view e-mail on mobile devices. Keep messages simple. (think visually)

Distribute your messages sensibly. Send a copy of an e-mail to anyone directly involved in the message, as well as to those who might need to be informed. For example, if you were filing a grade complaint with an instructor, you might also copy the chair of his or her academic department or the dean of students. But don’t let the copy (CC) and blind copy (BCC) lines in the e-mail header tempt you to send messages beyond the essential audience.