---
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.