I don’t know how, but my work email has been signed up for a few mailing lists that I have no interest in.
Not that I mind. Part of my job is writing persuasive emails. I want to see what other folks are doing. See if there are any cool techniques I can borrow. See if there are any, uh, pitfalls I might avoid.
Speaking of things to avoid…
This is a spam/quarantine report I get every day. I can’t adjust the size of the columns in that table. I get an invitation to this webinar at least once a week. I giggle every time.
People who suck the life out of your organ.
I’d call HR to report that, but… well, look at the domain.
This isn’t an uncommon problem in emails. I keep every unfortunate truncation I run across. Ages ago, when I was a teaching at WSU, I opened my phone before running a workshop at a conference (one focused on assessment strategies with short feedback loops to improve teaching) to see an email from the graduate school informing me that
Matthew, you are the reason they suc...
Where “suck the life out of your organ” makes me giggle once a week, this one really stung. I was involved in a lot of discussions about whether teaching strategies in writing classes were working.
How do we read truncation?
The big question is whether it really matters. Clearly, the webinarshr email is about people who suck the life out of your organization. The WSU Graduate School was telling me I was the reason they succeed. It’s obvious within a second of reading.
But what about that fraction of a second where your reader is trying to figure out which word completes the sentence?
Fans of the Penn & Teller show Bullshit will recall an episode about anger management, where a psychologist did a simple experiment on angry and calm people. The method was pretty straightforward: the angry group beat up a stuffed animal or a dummy to “get their anger out” before being asked to do a simple word-completion exercise. The calm group “hugged out” their feelings with the stuffed animal before the same word-completion exercise.
The result? Angry people would complete something like h_t as hit, while calm people completed it as hat. Other blanks would get similar violent words from angry people and similar neutral words from calm people.
I’d love to provide a clip here, but YouTube is coming up empty. But, know that this area of research is alive and well. Emotion really does impact the way we focus on specific words and ideas.
Which brings us to truncation: the shortening of a word or phrase by stopping it at some predetermined point. Email clients will truncate subject lines at a certain number of characters or words, hence organ… and suc… in the examples above.
A reader’s emotional state will impact the attention they give your subject line.
Dealing with truncation
There are plenty of good, informal rules to follow when it comes to subject line length.
- 8-10 words is a good number to shoot for, since that’s a short sentence and plenty to get the main idea across.
- 70 characters is one truncation point for a meta description, the short description that search engines show below the links in your search results, and that’s another good boundary to respect.
- A single, unpunctuated clause may also be a useful frame.
Ultimately, these all come out to roughly the same length. When I am writing emails, I tend to check these three items in reverse order: is it a simple clause? Is it 70 characters or less? Is it under 10 words? If it checks all of those boxes, then it’s unlikely to get truncated.
But, an untruncated subject line isn’t necessarily a good one, it’s just the one that has the best odds of succeeding.
