A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email - Summary
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
ducky@webfoot.com
Here, then, are my rules of thumb for good email style:
- Provide your audience with adequate context:
- Use meaningful subject lines
- Quote the email to which you are responding
- Avoid pronouns
- Be aware of page layout issues. Try to use:
- Short paragraphs
- Lines under seventy-five characters
- Email under twenty-five lines
- Find replacements for gestures and intonation:
- Smileys
- Asterisks
- Capital letters
- Typed-out vocalizations
- Whitespace
- Lower-case letters
- Creative punctutation
Hopefully these suggestions will be useful to you as you start your
emailing career! :-)
Go back to Contents
Go on to Gestures
Ducky
Modified 10 Dec 1994 - added one line, money link
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.