How to dictate an email that doesn't sound dictated
Speaking a good email is a skill. Not a hard one — about ten minutes of practice — but a real one, and nobody ever teaches it. Here's everything.
1. Say who you're writing to, out loud, first. Not into the email. In your head. "This is to Priya, who already knows about the delay." The single biggest reason dictated email sounds wrong is that people speak into a void and produce void-flavoured prose. Picture the person.
2. Lead with the ask. Speak the reason you're writing in your first sentence. You'll be tempted to warm up the way you do out loud — "so, I was thinking about the thing we discussed" — and you'll delete it afterwards. Start where the email starts.
3. Say your paragraph breaks by pausing. A short pause where you'd hit return does more for the shape of your email than any amount of editing afterwards. Two thoughts, two pauses, two paragraphs.
4. Don't say the punctuation. Old dictation software trained a generation of people to say "comma" and "full stop" out loud, and it is a miserable way to talk. You don't need to. Speak like a person and let the punctuation be someone else's problem.
5. Correct yourself out loud and keep going. "We'll ship on Tuesday — actually Wednesday." Don't stop, don't restart, don't apologise to your computer. This is normal speech and it should survive as "We'll ship on Wednesday." If your tool can't handle that, your tool is the problem.
6. Ramble on purpose for the hard ones. For a difficult email — bad news, a negotiation, an apology — say the whole thing badly first. Every point you need to make, in any order, at any length. You'll get further in ninety seconds of talking than twenty minutes of typing, because typing makes you edit while you compose, and editing while composing is why difficult emails take all afternoon.
7. Read it once before you send. Always. Not to fix the words — to check the temperature. Spoken thoughts carry more of your mood than typed ones, which is usually a gift and occasionally a liability.
The habit that makes it stick
Do your next three emails this way, including one you're dreading. The dreaded one is where you'll feel it: the reason that email has been sitting there for two days is that you didn't want to type it, and it turns out you never minded saying it.