Essay: Effective E-Mail

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While electronic mail (e-mail) has become an integral part of many people's daily lives, there has been little done to inform or train users in what constitutes effective practices. There are some simple considerations that will set e-mail users on the right path to communicating effectively in this medium.

Since its introduction, electronic mail has become critical for business and personal communications. E-mail is cheaper and faster than a letter, less intrusive than a phone call, and less hassle than a fax. Using e-mail, differences in location and time zone are less of an obstacle to communication and many people are nearly always online with e-mail during the business day. Thanks to devices like Blackberries, e-mail can be available in practically every moment, even when attention should be elsewhere.

Knowing that e-mail is a widely used and effective way to communicate does not make us good at using it. Our communication style needs to be adjusted for the medium. What makes e-mail a unique kind of communication? E-mail's speed and ability to be routed easily to others makes it fundamentally different from paper-based communication. Because the response can be immediate, e-mail is more conversational than traditional paper-based media.

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 e-mail documents, your recipient can ask questions immediately. E-mail, like conversational speech, tends to be more informal than communications on paper. While this may seem like a deficit, think of the time that is saved by not dedicating an hour to a message making sure that your words are eloquent and your grammar beyond reproach.

It is important to consider that your correspondent won't have normal status cues such as dress, diction, or dialect communicated in your message. They make assumptions based on your name, address, and facility with language. You need to be aware of when you can be sloppy and when you can't.

E-mail does not convey emotions nearly as well as face-to-face or even telephone conversations. It lacks vocal inflection, gestures, and a shared environment. Your correspondent may have difficulty telling if you are serious or kidding, happy or sad, frustrated or excited. Sarcasm is particularly dangerous to use in e-mail. Someone said "e-mail always sounds ruder than it was intended," so be careful what you write (and what you read) into e-mail.

Lastly, another difference between e-mail and paper-based media is that what the sender sees when composing a message might not look like what the reader sees. With e-mail, the software and hardware that you use for your e-mail may be completely different from what your correspondent uses. Your message's appearance may be quite different by the time it gets to someone else's screen. If appearance is critical, then use an attachment in a commonly used format like Word or Adobe PDF.

With all this in mind, here are the tips:

1. Use meaningful subject messages. Many people won't open trivial e-mail or will file the e-mail in a folder for future reference. A meaningful subject will help in both cases. Especially bad: Subject: information. This means nothing to the reader.

2. Don't respond to an e-mail without quoting the question or statement in the original e-mail that prompted you to respond. The sender no doubt has sent many messages and your reply, without the context, will not be meaningful.

3. Watch your use of pronouns. Without complete context the "he", "she", or "they" you use may be a mystery to the recipient.

4. Save everyone's time by being concise. You can even go back to what you've written and ask yourself if any of it is unnecessary. While you may want to include some conversational sentences as a way of being friendly or informal, reading text on the computer screen is not as easy as on paper and readers expect that if they take the time to interrupt what they are doing to read an e-mail that it be short and meaningful. The medium requires that you make points with the minimum of words.

5. Informal does not mean incorrect. Most e-mail clients have a Spellchecker but many errors are caused by the mistyping of real words, like "or" for "of", Proofread your work to make a good impression on the reader.

6. Keep in mind that the reader pays attention to cc: recipients. Critical comments copied to others can create resentment. Similarly, clean any critical comments before forwarding an e-mail to others or your comments may end up in someone else's e-mail inbox (perhaps even the person you are complaining about). It is always best not to use e-mail for griping and sniping because it leaves an electronic trail.

7. There are few situations where BCC: is appropriate. Someone once said to me, "It's not who gets CC:'d, it's who gets BCC:'d." If you are pointing out someone's shortcomings secretly to a superior, for example, this can certainly come back to haunt you; breaking trust, creating unnecessary turmoil, and giving the appearance (likely deserved) of backstabbing.

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