If you read nothing else…

I’ve received a few lengthy emails recently that contained the following:

IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE READ THIS SECTION

While I suppose one could argue that this encourages the reader to skip over the rest of the email, I disagree.  I think it’s brilliant. Each email was full of information – the kind that takes a good chunk of time to parse through and think about. They were the kind of email that ends up in your “read later when you have time” folder which would have been fine assuming that you 1) got back to it at all and 2) got back to it in a somewhat timely manner – they each required a response. The “READ THIS NOW” section was a single paragraph that summed up the information that I could now go through at my leisure as well as the action required in response to the email. Well done!