/summary-style-guide

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.