End a six-year relationship with a freelancer in under 200 words. The email must be kind, unambiguous in its first paragraph, and free of promises the sender cannot keep.
Read the email before the explanation. Marta should know in the first paragraph that the work is ending, while still feeling respected after six years.
Clarity. If a reasonable reader could reply asking whether the decision is final, the email failed. Euphemisms and provisional phrasing are not kindness here.
Warmth. It should acknowledge the relationship without sounding like a corporate template or an apology for making the decision.
Promises. Reject vague offers of future work. A concrete, credible offer such as being a reference is fine.
Constraints. Check the word count, date, banned openings, and the instruction not to mention her husband's illness.
Self-critique. The defended sentence should be the difficult clear sentence, not a soft or decorative line.
Ranking: clear in paragraph one, warm, and free of false promises > clear but hedged > clear but cold > warm and ambiguous.
I need you to write one email for me. The email itself — not advice about how to approach it.
Marta has done our bookkeeping for six years. She is a sole trader and we are roughly 60% of her income. She has never missed a deadline, she has caught two mistakes that would have cost us real money, and I like her.
We are moving to an accounting firm that bundles bookkeeping with the audit work we now need. The decision is made, it is signed, and it is not about her work. It is also not reversible.
Her last year was hard — her husband was ill for most of it, she told me so, and twice she asked whether everything was alright with our account. Both times I said yes, and both times that was true when I said it.
I want to tell her by email. She is not someone I see in person, and a phone call I cannot schedule for another four days would be worse than a clear message today. I want her to think well of me afterwards, and I would be glad to be a reference.
Answer in exactly these sections:
Subject line, then the body. Ready to send.
Three sentences at most on the one structural choice you made — what you put first, what you left out, what you refused to soften — and what that choice costs.
Quote the single sentence in your email that you expect me to want to soften, and say in one line why it should stay.