How do you dictate a professional email?

To dictate a professional email, decide its purpose in one sentence, speak it in three parts, and then check the details on screen before you send. Start the dictation in your mail program, and check that your setup meets its limits first. In a 1978 study of business letters, about two-thirds of composition time went to planning, whichever way the letter was made, so the plan is where to spend your care ¹.

Check your setup before the first email

The setup decides which steps are available to you. Three limits matter most.

If the Dictate button is missing in Outlook, check that you are signed in with a Microsoft 365 account. Where a work email is involved, check your employer's rules on which dictation tools you may use before you rely on one.

Speak the email in three parts

1. Decide the purpose. Write one sentence that says why you are writing. For example: "Confirm the Thursday review moves to 3 pm."
2. Start dictation in the message body. Click into the body, not the subject line, and start the dictation from the table above.
3. Speak the purpose first. Say it as the opening line, so a reader who stops after one line knows why you wrote.
4. Speak the details in the order the reader needs them: dates, names, figures, and what is attached.
5. Speak the ask last, with a deadline if there is one. Keep it on its own line so it cannot be missed.
6. Speak the sign-off, or insert your usual closing.

Spoken line breaks depend on the platform. On a Mac, saying "new line" is the same as pressing Return once, and "new paragraph" is the same as pressing it twice ⁶. Windows voice typing has its own command list, so check it before you rely on a command.

Here is the result, with the three parts in order:

Subject: Thursday review moved to 3 pm

Hi Dana, I'm writing to confirm that the Thursday product review moves from 1 pm to 3 pm, in Room 4B. The agenda and the Q3 figures are attached, and the new budget numbers are on slides 6 and 7. Could you confirm by end of day Wednesday that you can attend?

The first sentence states the purpose. The middle carries the details. The last sentence is the ask. Dictation wrote the sentences, but the structure came from a plan you made before you started speaking.

Check names, numbers and dates on screen

Speech makes fewer errors while it is entering text than the keyboard does, but more of its errors survive into the final text. In a 2018 study of short messages on a phone, 1.30 percent of the speech-entered text was still wrong in the final version, against 0.79 percent for the keyboard ⁷. The surviving errors are the ones that sound right.

Read the message on screen rather than trusting your memory of what you said. Check, in this order:

• Names of people, companies and products, including spelling and capitals.
• Numbers and amounts, such as prices, quantities and invoice numbers.
• Dates and times, with the time zone if the reader is in another one.
• Email addresses and links, which dictation rarely gets right first time.
• Words that sound alike, such as "to", "too" and "two".

Keep one purpose in each email

A message that asks for three things often gets an answer to only one. If you have several issues, send several short emails, or give each one its own paragraph and its own ask. The skill of dictating an email is mostly the skill of writing it clearly, so the spoken version should be shorter than a typed draft, not longer.

Practice before the email matters

In an IBM study from 1978, novice dictators learned within a few hours to dictate letters as fast and as well as they wrote them, although they did not think they were doing that well ⁸. That study used a recorder, not speech recognition, so it does not show the time you spend correcting software errors. Use your first week on routine replies, not on an important client letter.

For the time and speed case, see is dictating email faster than typing. For the common problems with spoken punctuation and proofreading, see how to proofread dictated text and how to say question mark when dictating. For a letter rather than an email, see how to dictate a letter. The guide to dictating email gives the full method, and the overview of dictation for work and study covers the rest.