A Brief Guide to Business Email - wednesday 2005-01-26 0527 last modified 2005-01-26 0527
Categories: Writing
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There are several guides to using email for business out there. Here's mine.

Use proper English. Or whatever your language of correspondence may be. There are guidelines to English grammar, syntax, and spelling for a reason: you can understand the message when it fits the rules. Anything less risks incomprehensibility.

Use plain text. Formatting text is unnecessary if you've written it properly. Your handwritten memos were useful without bold and italics. They are just as effective when written in proper language over email; 'bold' and 'italic' are not elements of language. Try to forgo the underlining and all-caps. Trust your own writing skills and your readers' reading skills to pick out the main points. Understand that not everybody is going to see your red, green, and blue monstrosity; people will view the Internet differently, you'll only hit everbody for certain with plain text.

Be concise. Your readers will have an even easier time understanding the point if there's less to read.

Forgo attachments. Put your non-textual content on the web and let them fetch it themselves. Take your textual content and put it directly in the email.

Forgo attachments to lists. Email servers need to handle email, not your 50MB presentation sent to 200 people. Leave that to a web server.

Use security if needed. If you think putting a document on the web is unsafe, you shouldn't be using email - anybody can read all of it. Reliable encryption software exists, make use of it.

Comments

good post

but I disagree on the plain text idea. Bullets and subheadings can be very useful and though I dislike the use of color, sometimes multiple in-line replies can be confusing and simply highlighting new threads is more clear. you're such a nerd :)

christine lieu on January 26, 2005 06:12 PM

You can do bulle...

You can do bulleting and subheading with creative use of text (use periods as bullets, just like 15.301 TAs!). I think the thing about plain text is keeping the content of the information from being conflated with its presentation. My user-agent automatically does in-line highlighting (color, indentation, side markings, and background color), and I'm glad I don't have to deal with somebody else's potentially repulsive sense of color coordination. Others' user-agents will behave differently, hopefully the way the user wants. That brings out a different point, though, to cut out unnecessary parts of a reply; I guess it's a corollary to the "Be concise" point.

Ryan Lee on January 27, 2005 03:54 AM

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