The past years heralded the advent of the age of AI and though some scepticism is certainly justified, there’s no denying that many of these tools have proven to be incredibly useful. Among the most practical applications are AI-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Bing/Copilot, Gemini, and Grok. These bots excel at processing natural language queries (like “What temperature should I cook my steak at?”), leveraging generative AI models to craft responses, and delivering answers in a variety of formats—text, tables, images, and more.

For better or worse, if you work any kind of corporate or office job, emails will take a prominent spot in your daily work schedule. They are arguably still the most important means of communicating, since they are both (nearly) instantaneous but also asynchronous and allow the transfer of structured information.

However, they are also one of the technologies that are rarely trained, since most people assume that writing a mail, be it digital or analog, is obvious. While that may be true in general, there is a significant gap between a well-crafted email and a poorly written barely understandable one. This post aims to give a sort of crash course based on personal experiences and opinions in how to write effective messages.