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 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.

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