| name | summary-style-guide |
| description | Tone and length conventions for email summaries — voice, verb tense, what to include vs omit, and target sentence count. Read this when writing the prose Summary line for each email so the voice is consistent across the report. |
Summary style guide
Each email in the report gets a one- or two-sentence prose summary. This
document covers the voice of those sentences. For the surrounding
markdown structure, the heading depth, and where the summary sits in the
document, see the email-formatting conventions.
Voice and tense
- Third-person, past tense. "Alice asked the team to review the deck"
rather than "I am asking..." or "Alice is asking...".
- Drop the salutation, the signature, and any thread quoting. The
summary is what the email did, not how it was framed.
- Active voice. "Bob declined the meeting" not "the meeting was declined
by Bob".
What to include
The summary should answer: what is the actionable substance of this
email? Concretely:
- The ask, decision, or status update at the heart of the message.
- Who is on the hook for what, if explicit.
- Any deadline or date that anchors the action.
What to omit
- Niceties ("Thanks!", "Hope you're well", "Cheers").
- The sender's restatement of what they previously said in the thread.
- Speculation about why the email was sent.
- Any attachment list — that's separate metadata, not summary content.
Length
- Prefer one sentence. Use two when the email genuinely covers two
distinct items (e.g., a status update and an unrelated ask).
- Hard cap: two sentences. If a summary feels like it needs three, the
email contains multiple threads of substance and the summary should
pick the most actionable one and drop the rest.
Confidence and hedging
If the email is ambiguous or the body is truncated, write a confident
summary of what's visible rather than hedging. Do not insert "appears
to" or "seems to be" — the consumer of the summary already knows it
was machine-derived.
