A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email:
Page Layout
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
ducky@webfoot.com
Words on a computer screen look different than on paper, and usually
people find it harder to read things on a screen than on paper. (I know
some people who go so far as to print out their email to read it!)
The screen's resolution is not as good as paper's, there is sometimes
flicker, the font may be smaller, or the font may be ugly. Your recipient's
mail reader may also impose some constraints upon the formatting of the
mail. This means that good email page layout is different from good
paper document page layout.
Shorter Paragraphs
In addition to the above-mentioned problems,
frequently the mail will be read in a document window with scrollbars.
While scrollbars are nice, it makes it harder to
visually track long paragraphs. Consider breaking up your paragraphs
to only a few sentences apiece.
Line Length
Most software to read mail does not automatically wrap (adjust what words
go on what line). This means that if the software you use to write mail
wraps your words for you, your recipient may end up with a message that looks
like this:
I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassembly ready; as soon as I get a decision on the thromblemeister selection, I'll be ready to go. Have you talked to the thermo guys about whether they are ready to go with the left-handed thrombo or do they want to wait and check out the right-handed one first?
It is even worse with some mail readers - they truncate everything past
the eightieth character.
This is not the way to win friends and influence people.
A good rule of thumb is to keep your lines under seventy-five characters long.
Why seventy-five and not eighty? Because you should leave a little room for
the indentation or quote marks your correspondent might want if he/she is going
to quote a piece of your email in his/her reply.
Terser Prose
We spend twelve to twenty years being rewarded for being verbose in our
writing. (How many times when you were in school were you told to write
a N-page paper?)
This is not appropriate for email, and the fewer people who are
getting the email, the terser you should be.
If they want more information, they can ask for it. (Also note that
in some places, people get charged by the byte and/or have limits on
how much disk space their email can use!)
My rule of thumb is that you should try to keep everything on one "page".
In most cases, this means twenty-five lines of text. (And yes, that
means that this document is way, WAY too long for email!)
Some mailers support "attachments", where you can specify a document
(or even a binary file) to send with your mail. If your correspondent
has a mail reader that can handle attachments, this works very well:
a long attachment can be looked at later. However, if your correspondent
can't handle attachments and you send a non-ASCII file (like a Word
document, a binary, a picture, or even compressed text), be advised that
it will appear as just so much garbage. It might be better sometimes
to post the document on the Web and email a URL.
Go back to Contents
Go back to Context
Go on to Intonation
Ducky
Last modified 5 Apr 1995
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 would be nice but is not necessary.