A Guide to Effective Email
by Michael R. Irwin, copyright 1994-1997
Contents --
1. Introduction?
2. Why Is Email Different?
3. Email Context
4. Page Layout
5. Expressing Intonations
6. Displaying Gestures
7. In Summary
8. Jargon and Acronyms
================
1. Introduction
================
This document is written as an aid to attempt to help people write
better email. It is not a paper on the mechanics of sending email;
rather it focuses on what people write in, the contents of, their email.
Specifically -- how to say what you need to say.
These are the personal opinions of the author based on his use of email
over the last twenty years.
This paper is not the dogma of email. When writing, the most important
rule is simple: You should write in a manner that reflects your own
personality, while effectively and efficiently getting your point
across. Hopefully this document will offer some ideas that you hadn't
thought about before, and help you maximize your email effectiveness.
(c) copyright by Michael R. Irwin, 1994-1997
==========================
2. Why Is Email Different?
==========================
Electronic mail, or email for short, has dramatically changed how people
communicate. Because of its speed and broadcasting ability (copy to
multiple people at one time), it is dramatically different from paper-
based communication. Turnaround time is often so fast that email becomes
more conversational than traditional paper communications.
When using a paper document, it is absolutely essential to make
everything completely clear and unambiguous, since your audience may not
have a chance to ask for clarification. However, email documents let
your recipient read your communication and immediately respond with
further questions or comments. Thus, email tends to be much sloppier and
more ambiguous, much like conversational speech.
Although this sounds disastrous, it is actually a very positive process.
For instance, you may send a request for information to someone. Once
they receive your email, they realize that they need more information
from you before they can send the requested information to you. So ...
they immediately email a message back to you for clarification and the
next time you check your mail you will see the message and hopefully
respond. All of this can take anywhere from minutes to days depending
upon how often you receive and read your email.
When writing messages, you should remember that they will normally be
received within seconds of being sent. Knowing this, you should pay
attention to how and what you write. For instance, if you are
responding to a message that upset you, consider calming yourself before
responding. On the other hand, if you are sending a message to your
boss, try to be succinct and accurate.
Remember, the effort that you place in your email message should be
appropriate for the type of message being written. For instance, it is
probably not a worthwhile expenditure of energy to slave over a message,
making sure that the spelling is faultless, words eloquent, and grammar
beyond reproach, if the point of the message is to inform the recipient
that you are ready to go to lunch.
Granted, you should put some effort into keeping your subjects agreeing
with your verbs, spelling correctly, avoid mixing metaphors, and so on.
But if "The Rules " that you have learned from you grammar teachers get
in the way of effective communication, throw them out.
Since email can not relate gestures, vocal inflections, and shared
environment, it is not as rich a communication method as a face-to-face
or telephone conversations. The person you are corresponding with may
have difficulty telling if you are serious or kidding, happy or sad,
frustrated or euphoric. (Sarcasm is particularly dangerous to use in
email.)
Therefore email compositions must be different from both speech and
paper compositions.
(c) copyright by Michael R. Irwin, 1994-1997
================
3. Email Context
================
In a conversation, there is some shared context -- it can be the same
physical location as when talking in person, or the commonality of time
when speaking on a telephone. Even when there is paper documentation
there is some shared context that is embedded within the medium -- a
note on a birthday card, the contents of a talk at a conference, a term
paper that is given to your professor with a batch of other term papers,
or something similar.
With email, you can't assume anything about your correspondent's
location, time, frame of mind, mood, health, marital status, affluence,
age, or gender. This means, among other things, that you need to be
very, very careful about giving your reader some context.
---------------------------------
Creating effective Subject Lines.
---------------------------------
The subject line is an integral part of any email. It clearly identify
what will follow.
The subject line should pertain clearly to the email body. This lets
the person who receives the mail know the context of your message before
they read it. It should be brief and does not need to be a complete
sentence. (Many mailers will truncate long subject lines).
If you are responding to email, your mailer should preface the previous
subject line with "Re:" or "RE:" (for REgarding). If your mail program
doesn't do this, it would be polite to put in the "RE:" by hand.
If you are offering non-urgent information that requires no response
from the other person, consider prefacing the subject line with "FYI:"
(For Your Information), as in:
Subject: FYI: Copy of final report
Time-critical messages, prefaced with "URGENT:" is a good idea
(especially if you know the person gets a lot of email):
Subject: URGENT: Reports due this week
For requests, prefacing the subject with "REQ:" is beneficial:
Subject: REQ: current budget estimate
Eliminate the word 'information'
Suggestion -- consider eliminating the word "information" from your
subject lines, and maybe from the body of your message as well. I often
receive email that looks like this:
Subject: information Please send me info about your writings
This gives me very little clue as to what the person wants to know
about: my books? which book? my training courses? which course? Am I
supposed to send paper documents or give URLs? The only thing I could do
with email like this was ask for further context. Mail like this would
have been much better as:
Subject: REQ: any Web pages with books about databases?
-----------------
Quoting Documents
-----------------
When referring to previous email, you should explicitly quote that
document to provide context.
For instance, instead of sending an email that simply says:
yes, thanks.
Say:
> Are you going to have the sales report done by Tuesday?
yes
The greater than sign ( > ) has become the relatively standard
convention for quoting someone else's words.
---------------
The problem ...
---------------
Imagine getting a response like this on Friday to some email that you
think you probably sent on Tuesday:
I talked with Jim the other day, and he said that he needs
to see the other one before he can decide.
(Huh???) You'd probably be much happier with:
> I've forwarded the report on the prospectus I received,
> based on price and performance, I'm ready to go when you are.
> Have you talked to Jim about whether he wants to but this
> stock or the one being reviewed by Jane?
> Does he want to wait until the price drops
I talked to Jim about it the other day, and he still hasn't
seen the review by Jane. After reviewing it, he will make
up his mind.
This is substantially better, but now errs on the side of too much
context. You shouldn't have to wade through gobs of extraneous stuff to
get to the meat of the message. You should include just enough to
provide a context for the message and no more.
As a rule of thumb, remember that at least half of the lines in an email
message should be your own. If you must include the whole message that
you are replying to, include it after your response.
You would probably be even more pleased with:
> Have you talked to Jim
I talked to Jim about it on Thursday, and he says that he
will need a few more days to work on the project before
reaching a decision.
Note that here there is the right amount of context, and the answer is
very clear and specific. A good rule of thumb is to look very carefully
at all pronouns in your first three sentences. If they don't refer to
something explicitly stated in the email, change them to something
concrete.
If the sentence is in the middle of a paragraph, or wraps around lines,
go ahead and remove everything but the part that you were really
interested in, inserting "[...]" if you have to take something out in
the middle. If you need to substitute a value for a pronoun, go ahead
but put the value in square brackets:
> [Jim] wants to evaluate the options.
Jane's report should be on my desk by this afternoon (Friday).
I'll forward it to Jim the minute it hits my desk.
(c) copyright by Michael R. Irwin, 1994-1997
==============
4. Page Layout
==============
Words on a computer screen look different than their counterpart on
paper. Many people find it harder to read things on a screen than on
paper. (I actually know some people who print out all of their email
before they read it!) There are many reasons for this -- the screen's
resolution is not as good as paper's, sometimes there is flicker, the
font may be difficult to read. The person receiving the mail may have a
reader program that can impose other constraints upon the formatting of
the mail. This means that a good layout of an email page is different
from good paper document page layout.
------------------
Shorter Paragraphs
------------------
In addition to the visual problems mentioned above, the mail will
probably be read in a document window using scrollbars. While scrollbars
are nice, trying to track long paragraphs can be difficult. Consider
breaking your paragraphs into smaller sizes. Try to only use a few
sentences in each paragraph, making each no longer than eight to nine
lines long.
-----------
Line Length
-----------
Many email software programs do not automatically wrap words (adjust
what words go on what line). The software you use to write and read your
email is probably different from the program used by the person you are
writing to. You program may wrap your words for you, while your
recipients may not. This means that they may only see three lines of
text instead of three paragraphs. They will have to use the scroll bar
to scroll to the right and display the remainder of each paragraph.
A good rule of thumb is to keep your lines under seventy-five characters
long. Why seventy-five and not eighty? Because you should leave a little
room for margins of the window, and any editing marks that the recipient
may want to add when responding back to you. For instance, the
recipient may want to add indentation or quote marks to your
correspondence if he/she is going to quote a piece of your email in
his/her reply.
------------
Terser Prose
------------
We spend from twelve to twenty years in education being rewarded for
being verbose in our writing. (Remember all the times you were told to
write a N-page paper?) This is not appropriate for email, and the fewer
people who are getting the email, the terser you should be. If they want
more information, they can ask for it.
(Also note that in some places, people get charged by the character
and/or have limits on how much disk space their email can use!)
A good guide to use is -- you should 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!)
Some mailers support "attachments", where you can specify a document (or
even a binary file) to send with your mail. If your correspondent has a
mail reader that can handle attachments, this works very well: a long
attachment can be looked at later. However, if your correspondent can't
handle attachments and you send a non-ASCII file (like a Word document,
a binary, a picture, or even compressed text), be forewarned it will
appear as garbage to the recipient. It might be better to post the
document on the Web and email a URL.
(c) copyright by Michael R. Irwin, 1994-1997
========================
5. Expressing Intonation
========================
Although you can increase the volume of your voice higher or lower,
louder or softer to denote emphasis in a person-to-person conversation,
you are not able to accomplish this with email. However, there are
games you can play with text to convey vocal inflection.
--------------
Light Emphasis
--------------
If you want to give something mild emphasis, you can enclose it in
asterisks. This is similar to placing text in italics in a paper
document.
Instead of:
I said that the report will be done by Friday afternoon.
Say:
I *said* that the report will be done by Friday afternoon.
Or:
I said that the report will be done by *Friday* afternoon.
Which of the above two you choose depends upon whether you are adamant
about the commitment you made or adamant that you didn't mean Wednesday.
You can also capitalize the first letter only of words to give light
emphasis:
Although we usually meet on Thursday mornings, it is not
Cast In Stone. If more than three of us are absent, we
need to postpone our meeting
I tend to use first-capitals to refer to things that are somehow
dogmatic or reverential. This is probably a holdover from all the
capital letters that are tossed around in The Bible.
---------------
Strong Emphasis
---------------
If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and
toss in some extra exclamation marks. Instead of:
> Should I just remove the back of the computer?
No, if the temperature difference quickly changes
more than 5C degrees it might explode.
Say:
> Should I just remove the back of the computer?
No, if the temperature difference quickly changes
more than 5C degrees IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!
Note that you should use capital letters sparingly, as it conveys the
message that you are shouting. It is totally inappropriate to use all
capital letters in a situation where you are calm.
Never do this:
HEY, I JUST WANTED TO SEE IF YOU HAD MADE ANY PROGRESS
ON THE PROJECT. STOP BY AND SEE ME AT YOUR CONVENIENCE.
----------------
EXTREME Emphasis
----------------
If you really want to emphasize something, you can go wild:
If the report is late this time, I swear upon my mother's
grave that I will never, *never*, *NEVER*, >>!!**NEVER**!!<<
talk to you again.
Use this sparingly.
------------------
Mutter Equivalents
------------------
In person, there are a number of ways that you can indicate that a
communication is private and not to be repeated. You can lower your
voice, you can look to your right and to your left either with your eyes
or with your whole head, and you can lean closer to the other person.
While these obviously make it more difficult for someone to overhear,
these signals are so ingrained that we might use them even if there is
nobody around for miles.
Unfortunately, lowering your voice is hard to do in email.
While it is a bad idea to assume that nobody will ever see the email you
send, what I do in cases like this is to write what I really think and
then write down the sanitized version:
Jim got fired, I mean resigned today, which *totally* sucks,
err.. will lead to better relations between the customers and
his OLD company.
"Erasure marks" - either ^H or ^? can be used to emphasis the muttering
of text. For instance:
Jim got fired, I mean resigned today, which *totally* sucks,
^H ^H ^H will lead to better relations between the customers
and his OLD company.
This type of reference can appear strange to many people.
Some people use double parentheses -- (( text )), to denote "inner
voice", what in theater-talk is known as an "aside":
Jim resigned today ((yeah, like I believe that story)), which
will lead to better relations between the company and customers
((yeah, like you believe *that* story))...
Other ways to denote the "lowering of voice" is to type without capital
letters, use the 'word' psssst!, and maybe use parentheses with
suggestion words:
psssst! hey steve! (( guess what? )) I GOT THE RAISE !!! :-D
See the :-D at the end of the message, this is known as a smiley
which is covered in the next section.
(c) copyright by Michael R. Irwin, 1994-1997
======================
6. Displaying Gestures
======================
While you are unable to add hand or facial gestures to your words, there
are several ASCII stand-ins for gestures.
-------
Smileys
-------
A facial gestures can be represented with "smiley": a sideways drawing
of a facial expression. The most common three are
:-) ;-) :-(
a plain smile a smile and wink a frown
(To understand the symbols, turn the page and look at them from the
side.)
While people will have slightly different interpretations of the exact
difference between the first two, many believe that the leftmost one
means "I'm happy" and the middle one means more "I'm kidding". Of
course the last one suggests "I'm sad".
A few typical examples:
Hey, guess what - I got the proposal done ahead of time! :-)
Now, I'm on my way to fame and fortune! ;-)
The second smiley, the ;-), indicates that you don't really believe
that the sending of the proposal will guarantee success. It is similar
to but not as fierce a rebuttal as a "NOT!" (from the movie Wayne's
World) appended to the end of a sentence:
Hey, guess what - I got the proposal done ahead of time! :-)
Now, I'm on my way to fame and fortune! NOT!
There are a wide range of Smiley gestures available to you, from %^P
(ill) to >:-< (angry) to :-o (astonished). They are only limited by
your imagination. There is a whole Smiley dictionary out there on the
Net if you are feeling uncreative.
-----------------
Pause Equivalents
-----------------
Imagine that you ask someone if you should put the car in first gear
while driving 50 kilometers per hour. He looks at you and says, "Well",
pausing for a long time, he scratches his head, looks down at the floor,
winces, grits his teeth, and says again, "Well", then pauses and says,
"The engine might not explode". You'd get a sense of just how bad an
idea it would be, while the equivalent text in an email -- Well, it
might not explode. gives less information.
One way to express the same feeling in email is to use lots of white-
space and typed-out vocalizations of "I'm thinking" sounds, (deliberate
extended spelling of words) as follows:
Weeeellllll.... errr hem. Wellll, it *might* not explode!!
You can also use white-space to make it more clear which words belong to
which clause.
Do you want to use a left-handed drive car
or a right handed one.
Another trick is to go one step further, and numerically outline your
text.
Do you want to use:
1. a left-handed drive car or
2. a right handed one.
--------------------
Creative Punctuation
--------------------
Using punctuation in what is called "comic book style" can be a very
effective way to show or express emotion. Instead of saying:
I am a little upset. Why did you hold my report instead of
giving it to Jim?
I'd say:
???! ???! Why did you hold my report instead of giving it
to Jim ???! ???!
The question mark is kind of shorthand for a furrowed brow or a "huh?".
While the exclamation mark is shorthand for amazement and possibly a
scowl. The two together tend to suggest astonishment.
There is a long and proud tradition of using punctuation as a
placeholder for swearing, e.g. That #%&#$(*!
You will also sometimes see an asterisk in place of important letters,
usually the vowel, e.g. That s*n of a b*tch!. (In actual practice, this
form of self-censorship is rare; it is more common for people to either
use the whole word or omit it completely.)
(c) copyright by Michael R. Irwin, 1994-1997
==================
7. In Summary
==================
Here, then, are my rules of thumb for good email style:
1. Provide your audience with adequate context:
* Use meaningful subject lines
* Quote the email to which you are responding
* Avoid pronouns
2. Be aware of page layout issues. Try to use:
* Short paragraphs
* Lines under seventy-five characters
* Email under twenty-five lines
3. Find replacements for gestures and intonation:
* Smileys
* Asterisks
* Capital letters
* Typed-out vocalizations
* Whitespace
* Lower-case letters
* Creative punctuation
Hopefully these suggestions will be useful to you as you start your
emailing career! :-)
(c) copyright by Michael R. Irwin, 1994-1997
======================
8. Jargon and Acronyms
======================
Several attendees of our sessions have asked for a jargon/acronym page
for email.
Contrary to how new users may feel, there is not a conspiracy out there
to try to exclude them from newsgroups and email. Any group that spends
time together develops its own shorthand notation; it is not surprising
that people who are forced to use the unnatural action of typing would
be inclined to use short hand and acronyms.
Many come from Usenet newsgroups, some of the more "gestural" ones come
from Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
Obviously it would be nice if seasoned users not pepper novices with an
enormous amount of jargon. But the fact is, nobody knows you are a
newcomer to the Internet, you are just another member of the Internet
family. So to prepare you for the inevitable acronyms of email, here are
some of the most common acronyms:
BTW - By The Way
FYI - For Your Information
IMHO - In My Humble/Honest Opinion
TIA - Thanks In Advance (also sometimes written advTHANKSance)
RTFM - Read The F****** Manual ("Manual" here refers to any
documentation)
LOL - [I] Laughed Out Loud [at what you wrote]
ROTFL - [I am] Rolling On The Floor Laughing [at what you wrote]
RSN - Real Soon Now
Some one pointed out to me that a term that isn't used but should be is
-- "NRN", for "No Response Needed". Often, with a lack of body
language, it isn't clear when an email-based conversation should be
ended. One member of the Internet, Peter Wone, suggests that "NRSVP"
for "non respondez-vous s'il vous plais", or "pleast do not respond" is
easier to guess than "NRN".
To unravel jargon and technical Internet terms, you should look up the
Internet Literacy Consultants' Glossary of Internet Terms.
(c) copyright by Michael R. Irwin, 1994-1997
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