You will practise the point-first structure on real messages and compare how they read before and after.
Reading about putting the point first is easy. Doing it to your own writing is harder, because your own messages make sense to you. You know what you meant, so the buried request doesn't look buried. This exercise uses three real messages from your last month at work to show you where your points actually sit, and gives you a second opinion from someone who reads them cold.
Set aside twenty minutes and open your sent folder and your chat app. You will also need one colleague for five minutes at the end.
Pick three things you wrote in the last month: one email, one chat message, and one longer document such as a report, a proposal, a handover note or meeting minutes. Choose ones that asked for something or reached a conclusion. A message that only said "thanks" has no point to move.
The best candidates are messages that got a slow reply, a confused reply, or a "can we discuss?" Those are the ones where the structure probably cost you something.
In each original, find the sentence that says what you wanted: the request, the decision you needed or the conclusion you reached. Highlight it and count which sentence it is: the first, the third, the ninth?
Be honest about this. If the request is spread across two sentences in different paragraphs, mark both. If there is no clear request at all, write down what you wanted in one sentence now. That is useful to know too, because a reader can't act on a request you never quite made.
Rewrite each message so the request or conclusion sits in the first two lines, with the reasons below it. Use what you learned in lesson 1.2 for the longer document: one governing point on top, two or three reasons, and the detail grouped under each. For the email and the chat message, the test from lesson 1.1 is enough: could someone who stopped after two sentences tell what you want, from whom and by when?
Keep the greeting if your workplace expects one, and keep the courtesy. Only the order changes.
Mei Ling is a junior accountant at an audit firm in Tanjong Pagar during the busy season. Here is an email she sent a client.
Before:
"Hi Mr Ravi, hope you are well. As discussed during our meeting last week, we have started our fieldwork on the revenue cycle. We went through the sales listing you sent on 3 March and matched it against the invoices on the shared drive. Most items were fine. However, we noticed that 14 invoices from December could not be located. These relate mainly to the Johor customer. Could you or your team help to upload them by this Friday? Otherwise we may need to extend our fieldwork. Thank you."
The request is in sentence six. The deadline sits in the same sentence, and the consequence comes after it.
After:
"Hi Mr Ravi, could your team upload 14 December invoices to the shared drive by this Friday? We can't find them, and without them we would have to extend fieldwork into next week. They are mostly for the Johor customer, and the list is attached. The rest of the sales listing matched. Thank you."
The rewrite is shorter, and Mr Ravi knows in the first line what she needs and by when. The consequence of missing Friday moves up too, which gives him a reason to act now.
Her chat message to her senior, before: "Hi Jason, are you free?" followed, twenty minutes later, by a question about which materiality figure to use. After: "Hi Jason, for the Ravi client, should I use the planning materiality of S$50,000 or the revised one from last week? I need it to finish the sampling today." The figure is invented for this example, and Jason can answer in one word.
Her longer document was a page of notes on the revenue cycle. She found her conclusion, that two controls had failed, at the end of page one. In the rewrite it became the first line, with one paragraph per failed control underneath.
Show a colleague the before and after versions of one message without saying which is which. Ask which one they would act on faster, and why. Choose someone who doesn't know the background, since they read the way a busy recipient does.
Listen to the reason they give. Sometimes it confirms the structure, and sometimes it catches something else, such as a missing deadline or a request that was still vague. Mei Ling's colleague pointed out that her first rewrite said "this week" instead of "this Friday", which would have left Mr Ravi to guess. Note what they say next to the message.
When you're done, you have three pairs of messages, each with the original and the rewrite side by side, the point highlighted in both so you can see how far it moved, and the colleague's comment on one of them. Most people find the same habit repeating across all three, often a long run-up before the request or a deadline left out. Spotting your own habit is the most useful result of this exercise, and the activity below asks you to put it into words for each message.
Produce before and after versions of three of your messages and write one sentence on what changed in each.
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