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Vox Pop: Your best "best practice" for email?

Short Subject: Now You're Talking (1927)


prosaic [on email]

Chris Streeter picks up on a thread that I've been thinking about a lot lately (and he's kind to mention the relationship to Inbox Zero).

He reminds us that the etiquette for using a telephone was once well-established enough to earn a place in the encyclopedia:

the encyclopedia told you how to answer the phone. not how to pick it up and dial or how the phone switching system worked, but what to say. it even had illustrations (little susie picking up the phone, announcing her residence, listening attentively, etc.). anyway, the point is, nobody ever set the ground rules for email. nobody ever said, this is what the subject line should cover, this is how many sentences an email ought to be, this is how long you should reasonably expect a person to wait to reply, etc. they just threw it at us and let everyone make up their own rules. of course, everyone will make up their own rules anyway, and that encyclopedia sure did a helluva lot of good with our phone manners, didn't it? but still, the idea that we have never, ever, worked out a set of rules or mores for email is kind of incredible.

I think a lot of people would scoff at the idea of a standard for email communication, and I'll admit that I'm not sure what a truly comprehensive -- or even 80-percent-universal -- set of best practices would look like. But, that, in some ways is the problem.

"Netiquette" was pounded into my head from day one on the 'net, but I'll freely admit I've never been 100% -- at least partly because email was clearly the Wild West from a lot of people's perspective. We've each been free to evolve or fall ass-backwards into an understanding of how email should be used. How would we begin to ensure that any two given strangers could be on roughly the same page about what email is even for?

I doubt this is a problem that has one answer, but I'm intrigued to consider how we might start solving it if it were. So...

The Question to You:

Think about what you’d do if you ran the world. If you had to choose a single best practice for email usage — format, length, subject matter, even when not to use email.
If you could wave a magic wand and put one guideline in place that would be honored by 80% of civilized people, what would it be? Be creative as you like, but remember: it has to be generic enough that it would work for 80% of email communication everywhere.

What should almost everyone start doing differently with their email today?

MEP's picture

Turn off HTML Email whenever...

Turn off HTML Email whenever possible http://www.american.edu/econ/notes/htmlmail.rst

@Ian If you need bold and italics to more clearly communicate then you need to learn how to write clearer sentences. I suggest Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style" as a primer. The notion that I should have to set up a filter on my end to remove your markup is ridiculous. We both speak the same language and we both should be capable of writing in that language. Bold and italics are typographic tools, not linguistic ones, and they are most often crutches used by people who can't be bothered to rephrase their sentences correctly.

Which brings us to rule #1. Write well. If I left a voicemail for you where I babbled like an idiot -- even if I emphasized certain words to indicate their importance -- you'd delete it and block my phone number. For some reason people seem to think that written communication follows a different set of rules because "writing well is hard". Learn your own language and try to be literate in it. (Yes, I make allowances for non-native speakers)

As for making first contact with someone; be brief, straightforward and polite. If you are requesting something, make sure the tone of your sentences does not imply you demand that something or that you expect that something out of hand. And if you get that something be sure to reply with a sincere "Thank you."

 
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