In How to Revise an Email So That People Will Read It, David Silverman starts with this quote:

People think that the first draft is the big event and that revision is cleaning up afterward. But the first draft is really setting up the chairs, tables, and cups, and revision isn’t cleaning up after the party, it is the party.

The rest of the piece focuses on how to make the revision process better, but it misses a critical point. The revision process is marginalized because it is really difficult to coordinate by email. Here are David’s revision numbers:

I’ve found that for your average email, the number of revisions largely depends on the number of recipients. Here’s my experience:

1 to 5 recipients = 2 to 4 revisions
5 to 10 recipients = 8 to 12 revisions
Company-wide or to Executive Committee = 30 to 50 revisions

Here’s where I think he misses the critical point. You shouldn’t be revising an email multiple times by yourself before sending it to 5-10 people, nor should a group of 5-10 people try to coordinate revisions via email.

Email is not the right tool for anything that requires this much revision.

Commenter Kimberly Wiefling agrees, and suggests several alternatives:

If this many revisions is truly warranted it’s a sure sign that email is an inappropriate means to use for communicating the information. Pick up the phone! Schedule a teleconference! Or, better yet, have an in-person meeting to engage people in a lively and interactive way.

I agree with Kimberly that email is not the right tool, but the phone, teleconference, and meetings aren’t necessarily ideal either. It’s hard to get people together at the same time, something that physical and phone meetings require. What you need is a tool that puts the content online in a shared space, gives everyone access when it’s convenient for their schedules and time zones, and encourages revision.

Put the draft contents of the email on a wiki page, and send a short email containing a link to that page to those 5-10 recipients. Then let the revision party begin!

When recipients visit the wiki page containing the content that needs their input and revision, they’re going somewhere free from the distractions of their inbox, which means they can concentrate as they scan the revision history and make their own changes.

Unlike email, the wiki tracks all revisions so that the members of your group can see how the document has evolved up to the point they’re reviewing it. By pulling people in to the shared wiki page to review and revise the content, instead of pushing separate copies out to each person’s inbox, the wiki prevents “forking” of the contents – parallel revisions made by individuals without knowledge of how others are revising the document. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of email because forked revisions must eventually be reconciled in a painful and politically-charged process, or they get lost in the shuffle and never incorporated into the final document.

Higher quality and more substantive edits made 1) without distraction and 2) with full knowledge of previous revisions can actually lower the total number of revisions necessary and get the collaborative job done with less effort, reduced confusion, and better results.