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Professional Writing · Chapter 5

The Thirty-Word Memo

A memo earns its reader in the subject line and the first thirty words, and earns its result in the action line at the bottom. Compose the subject, drag the body into the order you would actually send, and switch the four parts of the action line on and off. The phone on the right shows what a charge nurse sees while triaging on a Friday afternoon.
1 · Compose the subject line
A subject line has to name the topic and the reader’s stake in it. Turn each component on and watch the inbox line change.
Topic
Action
Date
2 · Order the body
Drag a block, or use the arrows. Five sentences, all true, all yours — the only variable is what the reader meets first.
    3 · Build the action line
    Who does what by when, plus how you will know it happened — and a default clause for silence.
    What the reader actually sees
    Everything past word thirty is greyed, because on a phone, in a hallway, that is roughly what gets read.
    Inbox · 4 West
    J. Rivera, Nurse Manager · Fri 2:41 PM
    Why thirty. Bottom line up front came out of military staff writing and survives because it matches how busy people read: they triage in seconds, decide whether a message is theirs, and read the rest only if the answer is yes. Background is not deleted — it is demoted to paragraph two, where the readers who need it will still find it.