Saturday, July 12, 2008
- Send email in plain text - not “formatted” or HTML. Your font is hideous and your gratuitous spacing is offensive. Don’t even get me started on background images. Convey your message with punctuation, letters, words and sentences. If something is *really important* you can use asterisks, like that.
- Keep it short and to the point - a few sentences is almost always enough. There are many mantras about keeping your emails to two sentences or three sentences but the point is just that a shorter and simpler message is quicker and easier to understand for your reader. Always strive for the minimum.
- Proofread every email at least once - even if it’s just a “quick” email to a coworker, correct spelling and grammar are not optional. Your communications with other people are your connections with the world. Leaving those communications riddled with spelling or grammar errors only serves to jeopardize your accuracy, dilute your meaning and destroy the perception of your personal quality.
- Subjects are titles - so treat them as such. Proper title casing is in order when writing an email subject, except in rare cases when a question can be used instead. In that case, the question mark is not optional.
- Use quoting only to clarify a conversation - not as a huge anchor at the bottom of every email. Many email clients unfortunately insert the quoted text from the message you are replying to and most people don’t care, so they type their message above the quote — called “top posting” — and add to the madness (sometimes it’s several messages long). If you’re replying to specific parts of a message, type your response under the quoted part you intend to reply to and remove the rest of the quote.
Sample Email Exchange
To: John Doe <john@example.com>
From: Jane Smith <jane@example.com>
Subject: Buy Movie Tickets
Hi John,
Don't forget to buy the movie tickets before Thursday.
That reminds me -- have you looked up the directions to the theater?
--
Jane Smith
jane@example.com
To: Jane Smith <jane@example.com>
From: John Doe <john@example.com>
Subject: Re: Buy Movie Tickets
On July 11, 2008, Jane Smith wrote:
> That reminds me -- have you looked up the directions to the theater?
Yeah, I've got it all figured out.
--
John Doe
john@example.com
written by
Brad Fults
Archived at: http://h3h.net/2008/07/how-to-write-email/
I do not capitalize my subject lines as a matter of style. Only proper nouns get capitalized there, as in the body of my email. My use of email is too informal (even in a work context) to make the Title in All Caps As If I Were Writing a Book feel appropriate.
[...] — numist @ 12:00 am Fitting that Brad recently posted a useful tip about how to use email properly, since in the last week or two I’ve decided to venture into the weird world of email and see [...]
so, upon purchasing an iPhong 3G I noticed that proper email etiquitte is infuriating to adhere to because of the lack of the ability to delete text efficiently, resulting in massive amounts of quoted text (or none at all, if you just get sick of it and turn off quoting).
sigh. soon?
I agree that #4 is the weakest of the rules, but I can’t stand txt-style subject messages.
Agreed about the iPhone’s lack of good mass deletion support. I just turn quoting off.