Drafting communications on behalf of an executive
Drafting communications on behalf of an executive is a core EA responsibility that extends well beyond email. The scope includes meeting preparation documents, stakeholder memos, briefing notes, and a range of written materials the executive reviews and sends under their name.
The time savings this creates are real. An executive who receives a draft rather than a blank page makes faster decisions, produces cleaner output, and spends less time in writing mode. That time moves back into strategy, relationships, and the work that requires their direct engagement.
Effective drafting requires a clear process, familiarity with the executive voice, and an honest understanding of where the EA scope ends. The Plain Language guidelines maintained by the US federal government offer a useful baseline for professional clarity: short sentences, active voice, and the main point stated first. These principles apply to executive correspondence across virtually any industry or audience.
What falls within the EA drafting scope
The widest category is internal correspondence: emails to direct reports, team updates, all-hands prep notes, and cross-functional coordination messages. The assistant usually has full context on these, the relationship risk is lower, and a draft that is slightly off in tone is easy to correct without consequence.
The next category is routine external correspondence: client updates that follow a recognized pattern, partner acknowledgments, and event confirmations. These require more care with voice and relationship tone, but they are well within the drafting scope once the assistant knows the executive communication style with each audience.
The category that requires the most judgment is high-stakes external communications: board updates, investor correspondence, and any message where the executive position on a sensitive topic shapes the reply. The assistant can often draft the structure and populate the supporting data, but the executive needs to own the substance and the tone.
How to capture the executive voice before drafting
Reading the sent folder is the starting point. Six months of outbound messages reveal the patterns: how the executive opens and closes messages, how they vary their formality by audience, what phrases appear consistently, and what their sentence rhythm looks like under different levels of stakes.
Most executives have distinct registers for different relationship types. The messages to investors read differently from the messages to the operations team. The assistant needs to recognize each register and apply the right one based on the recipient and the stakes of the message.
Take notes on specific phrases the executive uses repeatedly. These act as calibration points when drafting and help reproduce the executive voice rather than approximating it. The calibration period lasts roughly 30 days. Every significant edit the executive makes to a draft is information about the gap between the draft voice and the actual voice.
A process for first-pass approvals
For any draft, resolve four questions before writing: Who is the recipient and what is the relationship context? What is the single main point? What is the appropriate formality level? Is there a deadline or constraint the message needs to acknowledge?
Those four answers narrow the draft to a small, clear target. Write the message the executive would send if they had two minutes and no friction: direct, appropriately toned, and complete without being comprehensive.
Frame the draft for approval with a short context line at the top: the recipient, the purpose, and whether the draft is ready to send or needs the executive to weigh in on something specific. This reduces review time to under 60 seconds for most messages. For guidance on email correspondence specifically, see our piece on writing emails on behalf. For a full picture of the EA role this drafting work sits within, see our piece on what executive assistants do.
Common drafting mistakes
The most common mistake is drafting without enough input. The assistant guesses at what the executive wants to say, produces a draft that misses the key point, and the executive rewrites from scratch. A 30-second briefing at the start prevents this. The assistant should ask rather than infer whenever the message involves a topic they have not been briefed on.
The second mistake is using the assistant voice rather than the executive voice. The words are accurate, the content is correct, but the tone is off. Recipients notice when the style does not match the executive they know, even if they cannot articulate why. Treating every edit as a calibration signal rather than a correction to move past builds the voice match over time.
The third mistake is over-formatting. Assistants uncertain about whether a draft is good sometimes add structure to compensate: headers, bullet points, and bold text where clean prose would serve better. Executive correspondence almost always reads better as plain paragraphs than as a bulleted document.
How the drafting scope expands over time
In the first month, the assistant drafts only the communications they are confident about: routine internal messages and correspondence types they have seen the executive handle many times. Everything else gets flagged with a context note.
By month six, an assistant who has been calibrating consistently should be drafting most routine external correspondence and taking a first pass at more complex materials before the executive reviews. The measure of progress is not how many messages the assistant drafts. It is how often the executive sends a draft without significant edits.