WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Grammar Minute: The Case for Ungrammatical Emails

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

Toss out your grammar book and your thesaurus when you're writing email subject lines (unless you want to sound like ChatGPT). Learn more on today's episode of Grammar Minute, and visit thegrammarminute.com for more tips and tricks.

Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we're saving the English language 60 seconds at a time. I'm Lauren Smith, and I'm here to talk about email subject lines. Don't ask me how, but I just found out recently that ChatGPT can generate these for you. It seems to like long, complete sentences, such as, I really enjoyed our conversation at the conference yesterday. This is grammatically correct, but the problem is that email subject lines are like social media post captions. Our lizard brains get three words in, and by then we've already, decided if this is something we want to read. Thus, when you're writing an email subject line,

sacrifice every word you don't absolutely need. For the sample sentence, you could shorten it to great to meet you, or follow-up XYZ conference. If you feel the need to add more details, just know the recipient probably won't read them. This is a great time for brevity and a great time to break almost every grammar rule. That's your grammar minute.