Maybe I’m missing something, but shouldn’t it be a FOUR-sentence email? 1-Who you are 2-What you want 3-Why you should get it 4-When you need it by Or is 5 “Kind regards”? Also you can ditch (1) in loads of emails. Your e-mail address often tells people who you are.

It’s easy to clean spam filtered inbox, if everyone writes this way!

who needs sentences! i just sum it up in a smiley. :razz: this one means i’m happy. :cry: oh! now, i’m sad.

Where I went to College in Dublin, they asked Samuel Beckett to come to the launch of this new theatre they had named after him. He sent a telegram that lives still on the English department’s wall.

Regret. Impossible. Beckett.

I’d say that works if you are the initial sender of the email. If you’re responding to the email I’m always delighted when I get more than a brief response; leaves a good impression imho.

One should know the “rules” so that one can break them with style. Beyond that, the petty “rules” like a five-sentence limit on e-mail are bogus. It’s much more important to write coherently than concisely. If that means writing much more than a single five-sentence paragraph, then one should write more. Arbitrary limits are stupid.

I suspect that explaining “who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by” is going to take more than five sentences since the amount of text required merely to justify “why you should get it” is going to be inversely proportionate to how well composed and polite your request is in the first place. If I think you are being overly terse or rude, I am very unlikely to give you anything, am I?

As it composed, I have trouble taking the suggestion seriously. IM-speak, like Guy’s “UR” instead of “you are”, is a strong signal that the author didn’t take any care about his writing. Why should I take any care in reading it or acting on it?

Oops! I went over the five-sentence limit! Shock! Horror! Mayhem!

This method works great when you are the one asking for something, but fails for The Answer Lady — often me.

I’m on several e-lists where I am the Answer Lady … people know who I am, and I answer what they asked. Sometimes I can answer in one sentence; sometimes I have to write that 5 paragraph essay.

Ever since I wrote my college term papers on borrowed typewriters, I’ve suffered from terse writing. I can live with this affliction :-)

{And one thing Guy missed … if you can add some light humor or a bit of politeness, it’s worth adding an extra sentence to do so.}

And there are my 5 sentences —Liz

Forget where I read about it, but I do a similar thing with the subject line by entering my initials at the end ( - TH) to signify that there’s no need to open the e-mail. It seems to work well, though only with short subjects. (I never want to be THAT person trying to cram an entire e-mail message in the subject line…)

What are the rules for blog post comments? One sentence? Two? Or, as this comment is structured, in four?

I’ve been trying to institute even less. When my message is less that about 5 words or so, I put an ‘*’ in the first position of the subject to let the reader know that there is no info in the message body and that the subject contains the entire message. For example:

*Your report is done *Call me ASAP *Get off the phone you freak! *Happy Hour….NOW!!!!

Doing a lot of work in automation and writing a blog on automation, not everything can be done automatically like I would like but it can sure be done more efficiently.

I believe the word you are looking for is “logorrhea”:

— excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=logorrhea