Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, 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 that point we’ve already decided if this is something we want to read further.

Thus, when you’re writing an email subject line, sacrifice every word that you don’t absolutely need to make your meaning clear. For the sample sentence, “I really enjoyed our conversation at the conference yesterday!” you could shorten it to “Great to meet you!” or “Followup: XYZ Conference.” If you feel the need to add more details after that, just know that the recipient probably won’t read them. This is a great time for brevity, and a great time to legally break almost every grammar rule known to man.

That’s your grammar minute! Visit thegrammarminute.com for more tips and tricks.