Families are reading everything you send to students

A second reader is present in most education communication, and pretending otherwise makes the writing worse.

In schools this is obvious. In training and higher education it is quietly true as well: a partner reads the fee notice, a parent reads the results letter, an adult learner forwards the timetable change to the person who has to rearrange childcare around it. Communication written as though it will be read once, in private, by the addressee alone, tends to assume shared context that the second reader does not have. Abbreviations, internal room codes, the names of teams, the assumption that the reader knows what a particular office does.

Writing for the second reader does not mean explaining everything from first principles. It means asking whether a message survives being forwarded. Does it say what it is about in the first line? Does it say who it is from in words rather than an acronym? Does it say what the reader has to do, by when, and what happens if they do nothing? Does it give a way to ask a question that is a real address rather than a no reply mailbox? Those four tests catch most of it.

There is also a tone question. Messages that would be perfectly reasonable between two people who know each other read as curt when a third party sees them. The forwarded message is the one that gets screenshotted, complained about and quoted back. Assume the audience is larger than the address line and the writing improves for everyone in it.