[Introduction] [What
Makes Email Different?] [Context]
[Format] [Page
Layout] [Intonation]
[Gestures] [Status]
[Formality] [Greetings
and Signatures] [Summary]
[Appendix A: Acronyms and Jargon]
[Appendix B: Domain Names]
[Appendix C: Bibliography]
A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email
Page Layout
Kaitlin Duck
Sherwood
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 several people who even 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, and/or the font may be ugly. Your
recipient's email reader may also impose some constraints upon the
formatting of the mail, and may not have the same capabilities as
your email software. This means that good email page layout is different
from good paper document page layout.
Shorter Paragraphs
Frequently email messages 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
Some software to read mail does not automatically wrap (adjust what
words go on what line). This means that if there is a mismatch between
your software's and your correspondent's in how they wrap lines,
your correspondent may end up with a message that looks like this:
(click)
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Furthermore, the "quoted-printable"
encoding also contributes to the line-length problems. If a line
is longer than 76 characters, it is split after the 75th character
and the line ends with an equals sign. People whose email reading
software can understand quoted-printable encoding will probably
have the lines automatically reconstructed, but others will see
ugly messages, like the following:
I've got the price quote for the Cobra subassemby 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?
There are even a few email readers that truncate everything past
the eightieth character.
This is not the way to win friends and influence people.
You should try to keep your lines under seventy characters long.
Why seventy and not, say, seventy-six? Because you should leave
a little room for the indentation or quote marks your correspondents
may want if they need to quote pieces of your message in their replies.
Terser Prose
How many times when you were in school were you told to write a 20-page
paper? Probably a lot, and you got penalized for being terse. This
training is not appropriate for email. Keep it short. If they want
more information, they can ask for it. (Also note that some of your
correspondents may be charged by the kilobyte and/or have limits on
how much disk space their email can use!)
If you are sending a report to many people, then you may need
to put more detail into the email so that you aren't flooded with
questions from everyone on the recipient list. (You should also
ask yourself carefully if all the people really need to be on the
list.)
The fewer the people there are on the recipient list, the shorter
the message should be. Books to thousands of people are tens of
thousands of words long. Speeches in front of large groups are thousands
of words long. But you'd tune out someone at a party who said more
than a hundred words at a time.
I 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!)
Summary
In summary, keep everything short. Keep your lines short, keep your
paragraphs short, and keep the message short.
Go on to Intonation
Go back to the beginning
Go back to Format
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