A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood ducky@webfoot.com

There are now mirror sites in/at: Sweden, Finland (dubious), Finland, UWC, United Arab Emirates, Argonne, Internet Resource Guide, England, Australia, and Primenet. The original is at Webfoot. These are all in English still; I'd be thrilled to death to link to translations as well.

Introduction

I wrote this document to try to help people to write better email. This is not a document on the mechanics of sending email. (And please don't send me email asking how to do things like add nicknames in Eudora!) This instead focuses on the content of email: how to say what you need to say. These are my personal opinions, formed by using email for the past twenty years.

This is not dogma - you should write to reflect your own personality - but will hopefully make you think about things you didn't think about before, and help you maximize your email effectiveness.

Why Is Email Different?

Electronic communication, because of its speed and broadcasting ability, is fundamentally different from paper-based communication. Because the turnaround time can be so fast, email is more conversational than traditional paper communications.

In a paper document, it is absolutely essential to make everything completely clear and unambiguous because your audience may not have a chance to ask for clarification. With email documents, your recipient can ask questions immediately. Email thus tends, like conversational speech, to be much sloppier and more ambiguous. (See also a quick essay on formality that I am trying to figure out how to work in to this document...)

This is not always bad. It might not be a worthwhile expenditure of energy to slave over a message, making sure that your spelling is faultless, your words eloquent, your grammar beyond reproach, if the point of the message is to inform the recipient that you are ready to go to lunch.

Granted, you should put some effort into keeping your subjects agreeing with your verbs, spelling correctly, avoiding mixing metaphors, and so on. But if The Rules that Mrs. Grundy laid down in seventh-grade English get in the way of effective communication, throw them out.

However, because of the lack of vocal inflection, gestures, and shared environment, email is not as rich a communication method as a face-to-face or telephone conversation. Your correspondent may have difficulty telling if you are serious or kidding, happy or sad, frustrated or euphoric. (Sarcasm is particularly dangerous to use in email.)

Thus your email compositions should be different from both your speech and your paper compositions. There are a fair number of documents on electronic email out there, but when I finished the original version of this document, they mostly talked about the nuts and bolts of how to get text from your fingers to your correspondent's screen. Those that did discuss email content tended to be really brief on the subject of email style, and gave little motivation for why the style is different. That's why I wrote this document: to address email style.

Since I wrote this, I have found two documents which cover a lot of the same ground. If you want more and/or a different perspective, see:

The Internet World article Learning The Ropes by Andrew Kantor (Aug 1994?)
The book Elements of E-mail Style by David Angell and Brent Heslop

Another viewpoint can be found at Business Netiquette International, but I disagree with some of his capitalization rules.

Go on to Context

Ducky

If you have any other words of wisdom about using email to its fullest, or want to argue with me about something, by all means, send me email! :-) Note, however, that I only use plain-vanilla UNIX mailx, so asking me technical questions about how to use pine or Eudora is a waste of your time. I also don't know how to find your friend's email address.

Created 10 Dec 1994
Modified 30 Dec 1995: added introduction, shareware note, jargon link
Added mirror sites 3 Feb 1995
Added link to Business Netiquette International 28 Jun 96

This document is in the public domain. You may copy it, modify it, shred it, mail it to your neighbor, put it on a telephone pole, tack it up on a bathroom wall, or anything else that you feel like doing with it. Some credit and/or money would be nice but is not necessary.

A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Contents

Introduction

Why Is Email Different?

This document is in the public domain. You may copy it, modify it, shred it, mail it to your neighbor, put it on a telephone pole, tack it up on a bathroom wall, or anything else that you feel like doing with it. Some credit and/or money would be nice but is not necessary.