A new skill: When to press Enter!
No. I am not joking. This is often ignored but extremely important.
Yes everyone knows that pressing Enter creates a new paragraph. Pressing it again creates extra space between paragraphs. You know that as well.
Read on to find out what is the big deal about it.
Using this while writing emails
Emails are fairly ad-hoc and we don’t spend too much time in formatting them (which you should). But never mind that.
I have written a very comprehensive article on this topic:
Office Politics: How to ensure your mail is noticed and acted upon?
Read it if you have time.
The idea is to use Enter as a formatting element to make your mail content easier to understand.
Here is the mail I wrote about some content which I was reviewing.
Now here is the SAME content with some Extra ENTER keys.
Do you see the difference? Not a single word has changed. But the second option is much better. It divides the content into separate pieces – each serving a specific purpose.
In the first option notice how sentences started anywhere because the paragraph wraps around depending upon the width of the window. In the second example, I pressed extra ENTER keys to force some sentences start on their own paragraph. This way, these sentences will ALWAYS start on a new paragraph, irrespective of the width of the mail window (or reading pane, or mobile view).
That’s all there is to it.
Unfortunately this is not the right way!
I can already hear some knowledgeable people saying “this is not the right way”.
You are absolutely correct. Want to know the most appropriate way?
I will cover it in the next article.
>>
