A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email:
Intonation

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood ducky@webfoot.com

While you cannot make your voice higher or lower, louder or softer to denote emphasis, there are games you can play with text to convey vocal inflection.

Light Emphasis

If you want to give something mild emphasis, you should enclose it in asterisks. This is the moral equivalent of italics in a paper document.

Instead of:

	I said that I was going to go last Thursday.

Say:

	I *said* that I was going to go last Thursday.

Or:

	I said that I was going to to go last *Thursday*.

Which of the above two you choose depends upon whether you are adamant about the committment you made or adament that you didn't mean Wednesday. (Restructuring the sentence to remove the ambiguity would be an even better idea.)

You can also capitalize the first letter only of words to give light emphasis:

	While Bob may say that you should never turn it past 
	nine, this is not Cast In Stone.  It will explode 
	if you turn it up to eleven, but anything under ten 
	should work just fine.

I tend to use first-capitals to refer to things that are somehow dogmatic or reverential. This is probably a holdover from all the capital letters that are tossed around in The Bible.

Strong Emphasis

If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation marks. Instead of:

	> Should I just boost the power on the thrombo?
	No, if you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat 
	the motors and it might explode.

Say:

	> Should I just boost the power on the thrombo?
	NO!!!!  If you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat 
	the motors and IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!

Note that you should use capital letters sparingly, as it conveys the message that you are shouting. It is totally inappropriate to use all capital letters in a situation where you are calm. Don't do this:

	HEY, I JUST WANTED TO SEE IF YOU HAD MADE ANY 
	PROGRESS ON THE PHROCKMEIJER ACCOUNT.  STOP 
	BY AND SEE ME SOMETIME.

Oooooooh, I HATE that.

EXTREME Emphasis

If you really want to emphasize something, you can go wild:

	If you are late this time, I swear upon my mother's 
	grave that I will never, *never*, *NEVER*, 
	>>!!**NEVER**!!<< talk to you again.

Use this sparingly.

Mutter Equivalents

In person, there are a number of ways that you can indicate that a communication is private and not to be repeated. You can lower your voice, you can look to your right and to your left either with your eyes or with your whole head, and you can lean closer to the other person. While these obviously make it more difficult for someone to overhear, these signals are so ingrained that we might use them even if there is nobody around for miles. Unfortunately, lowering your voice is hard to do in email.

While it is a bad idea to assume that nobody will ever ever see the email you send, what I do in cases like this is to write what I really think and then write down the sanitized version:

	My boss got fired I mean resigned today, which 
	*totally* sucks err.. will lead to enhanced 
	relations between Engineering and Test.

"Erasure marks" - either ^H or ^? - can also be used here:

	My boss got fired I mean resigned today, which 
	*totally* sucks^H^H^Hwill lead to enhanced 
	relations between Engineering and Test.

A friend of mine uses double parentheses to denote "inner voice", what in theatre-speak is an "aside":

	My boss resigned today ((yeah, like I believe
	that story)), which is going to lead to enhanced
	relations between Engineering and Test ((yeah,
	like you believe *that* story))...

Something else that I will do sometimes to denote the "lowering of voice" is to type without capital letters and maybe use parentheses:

	psssst! 
	hey wendy!
	guess what?










	I GOT THE JOB!!!! :-D :-D !!

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Ducky

Last modified 10 Dec 1994