if it's clear in your mind what you want the secretariat to do, you can write that into the message. The subject line is one obvious place.
Careful. Unless something has changed recently, the ticket system doesn't unfolder header fields and loses any subject line content after the first fold. The particular client I use folds subject: fields so I tended to lose the name of the draft I was talking about when I'd write "last call request for draft-foo-really-long". I've since taken to reiterating the subject in the body of the message so it is clear what document I am talking about. Using the short tags is therefore a good idea for the additional reason that the shorter the subject is the less likely it is to run into this limit. Ned