Manage Your Writing

The headline is the e-mail

At Bad Language, Matthew Stibbe has posted Ten Laws for Better Email. I could devote a whole posting to each one, but here's a taste:

3. The headline is the email. The subject line should be clear, factual and specific. It should also encourage the reader to open and read the email. Think about the subject lines used by chain emails . . . . Don’t be afraid to change the title of a long-running discussion thread if the subject matter has moved on. Put the old subject in brackets afterwards for continuity.

It's a great list, worth the couple of minutes it will take you to read it.

Urgent message? Don't use e-mail.

Scott H. Young has posted a great list of "The Seven Bad E-mail Habits that Make People Want to Kill You." My favorite is one that goes smack-dab against conventional wisdom:

My guideline is that I shouldn’t send an e-mail if I need a response in less than five days. Not only do some people take days to respond to e-mails, you won’t be able to convey urgency in text. When you are on the phone or in person, you can transmit the impending need of your request, while in text you can only resort to using CAPITAL LETTERS or exclamation marks!

Thanks to Lifehacker for the lead.

Don't rely on e-mail to communicate emotion

"We tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders."

--Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence, writing in the New York Times

So what's the solution? There are many, but here's one: Don't rely solely on e-mail when emotion is involved, either yours or your reader's. Writing has many advantages, but in short, quickly written pieces it's not  good at conveying subtle shades of feeling.

Breaking our e-mail chains

E-mail is a powerful tool, with the immediacy of speech but the permanence and "scanability" of writing. But it can enslave us.

Michelle Kessler, at USA Today, reports a new spin on "casual Fridays." She tells of companies that are adopting "e-mail-free Fridays."

One variation, she reports, is "e-mail bankruptcy--deleting or archiving an entire in-box and starting over."

I'm tempted. How about you?

(Thanks to Tim Sanders for the referral.)

Verify e-mail addresses

A great Web site, http://verify-email.org/, checks e-mail addresses to make sure they exist. This can be a useful tool if you suspect your messages aren't getting through.

(Thanks to Lifehacker for the tip.)

One million e-mails

"A mathematician friend told us that if ten people are emailing one another to try to decide among four restaurants, then you could have one million emails before you all decided on the restaurant."

So say David Shipley and Will Schwalbe in their eloquent and elegant manifesto "When You Absolutely, Positively Should NOT Use Email: A Civilized List."

(Thanks to Roy at Writing, Clear and Simple, for the lead.)

Friends don't let friends e-mail angry

Next time you're about to send an angry e-mail message, don't. Instead, take a tip from Michael S. Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. Hyatt offers us six alternatives to angry e-mailing. One I hadn't thought of:

4. Do your homework. Sometimes you think you are right, but upon further investigation, you may discover that you contributed to the problem or aggravated the situation.

(Thanks to Lifehacker for the connection.)

Emoticons, continued

In a posting on Wednesday, I joined the celebration of the 25th birthday of emoticons, the little faces ( :-), for example) that some writers add to e-mail to help convey a tone of voice.

I then discovered a post by Lynn Gaertner-Johnston (on her excellent blog Business Writing) cogently opting out of the celebration. So we've begun a respectful exchange in the comments section of her posting. In her most recent entry she writes

What I don't get yet is how emoticons can convey subtleties. Would you provide an example please?

That's a great question, and a hard one to answer. Because "subtleties" are, by definition, subtle, they're difficult to explain outside of the actual communication situation--a  situation involving the knowledge and feelings of a specific writer and specific reader at a specific time. But let me try.

A company for whom I do some contract training has fairly complicated procedures for invoicing and for having materials printed. I've screwed up several times and felt guilty about  doing so. I'm sure I've unconsciously conveyed that feeling of guilt in some of my communications.

Last month I received two messages with emoticons from one of my contact people in the organization. Here are "sanitized" excerpts:

• Please note that John is able to raise your training materials allotment amount with Materials Supplier when you need it to avoid future "insufficient funds" situations. Just give him a call or send him an email,  he is happy to help ;)

• I have a small favor to ask of you. : ) Would you mind please updating the Trainer invoice template  you have with your proper Supplier ID # of: XXXX-E (not XXXX-3) ... This helps us much in the research time on each invoice.

I may be revealing too much about my own insecurity, but in each message the emoticon helped me to gauge more accurately (I think) the feelings of the writer and to feel more secure in my relationship with the company. Yes, she could have phoned me (though she would still have needed to write, as well), and yes, she could, perhaps, have conveyed her tone in words alone. But the emoticons were an efficient and effective way to convey a tone she correctly thought I needed to hear.

Happy 25th, :-)

It was 25 years ago today; Dr. Fahlman taught e-text how to play.

On September 19, 1982, Professor Scott Falhman at Carnegie Mellon proposed :-) as a marker for jokes posted on a student-faculty electronic bulletin board. (Anyone besides me remember those?)

Since then, dozens, if not hundreds, of such "emoticons" have come into use.

Some purists decry emoticons. Emoticons, they say, contribute to the decay of language.

Balderdash. Throughout its history, written English has acquired new punctuation marks to help make meaning clear.  The question mark (9th century?) and the exclamation point (as early as the 15th century!) are examples. More recently, so-called "scare" quotes have come into use, to signal that the word or phrase they enclose is being used ironically or otherwise unconventionally. (Scare quotes have, of course, been imported into spoken English as "air" quotes.)

As always, know your reader. Readers of formal documents (in fact, most documents printed on paper) will be bothered or distracted by an emoticon. But emoticons fill a real need in conversational e-mail, and they're here to stay.

So feel free to use emoticons. If your boss hassles you, better do what she says. But if anybody else hassles you, just refer them to me. I'll set them straight. :-)

To, CC, or BCC?

The Tip of the Day for August 30, published by the Institute of Management Consultants USA, challenges us to rethink our use of  To, CC, and BCC in e-mail addresses:

In today's fast-paced world of information delivery, people can creatively leverage the unique power of e- mail delivery tools such as the "CC" and "BCC". Both tools save you the effort of composing multiple individual emails for every intended recipient. BCC actually helps you to work around some of the issues that can arise when using the "CC" (privacy, discreteness, elimination of a large number of addresses at the head of the email's body, etc.).

But have you ever thought closely about how the recipient views their placement in the address categories? How does Laura view being "CC'ed" versus directly addressed? Does she pay less attention to the message, feel less important, or is she just happy to receive the information? What about Terry's placement on the "BCC" list? Is he being given access to information that others would not feel is appropriate, or has he been placed there because the sender does not want his name to appear to the other addressees?

On your next e-mail, think about what would occur if the addressees in the "Send to:", "CC" and "BCC" categories were interchanged. Perhaps it will provide you with a new perspective on how and when to use these tools.