Thanks for the insight, Rich. I am constantly fighting with my inbox and deal with a ton of irrelevant emails, too.

A helpful tip I just learned about (through Cisco's internal Brand Language team) is the Flesch-Kincaid test.

It is a feature built into the spelling/grammar check in Microsoft Word. It gives your writing a readability score from 0-100. The higher your score, the more simple and easy to read it is. Which usually translates to the more likely it will be read and understood by others.