When You Receive an Email, Read it WIth Care Before You Respond

Carefully reading an email before responding to it seems like basic advice everyone should know, but I stopped being surprised at how often this seems to happen.  

In a business setting, expect to receive lots of emails. It is easy to breeze through them with a quick skim. To fully comprehend an email, a quick skim is not enough. A quick skim misses key points, especially when other things distract you.  

You see this in personal communications as well, many of us can tell when someone clearly didn’t read your email carefully. They answer the email they thought you sent, not the email that you intended to send. This can lead to unfortunate, personal misunderstanding. Such misunderstandings are bad enough in a personal setting, so you do not want those kinds of misunderstandings in a business setting.   

I’ve seen this type of avoidable misunderstanding happen in business settings. A quick skim leads to a misreading, which leads to working towards the wrong direction, which leads to lost time, money, trust, and reputation.   

A quick skim when opening a business email is a fine start to get the big picture, but it should not be the end. Make it a practice to read through the email a second time. When you do this second read, pick through the details, digest the information, and form a logical response. This extra step takes a little extra time and effort, but you will be more credible and your projects will run more smoothly because of it.  

To learn more about how you as a health care professional can learn and refine your business writing, please check out my book: A Business Writing Toolkit For Healthcare Professionals

Comments

  1. Aamir RajputOctober 2, 2025 at 12:00 PM

    I just found this blog and I'm so excited! Thanks for sharing your insights to issues that really
    speak to the challenges of our profession in the 21st century.

    https://tempmailr.com/

    ReplyDelete

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