A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email
Summary
Kaitlin Duck SherwoodHere, then, is my advice for good email style:
- Provide your audience with adequate context:
- Use meaningful subject lines
- Quote the email to which you are responding
- Avoid pronouns
- Be aware of page layout issues. Stick with:
- Short paragraphs
- Lines under seventy-five characters long
- Messages under twenty-five lines long
- Plain text
- Find replacements for gestures and intonation:
- Smileys
- Asterisks
- Capital letters
- Typed-out vocalizations
- Whitespace
- Lower-case letters
- Creative punctuation
- Be aware of what cues people will use to form impressions of you:
- Name
- Domain name
- Grammar, punctuation, and spelling
- Formality
- Signatures
Go on to Acronyms and Jargon
Go back to the beginning
Go back to Greetings and Signatures
Ducky Modified 10 Dec 1994 - added one line, money link
Modified 29 Oct 1998 - reflect added pages on status and formality
Moveed bibliography to be the last appendix, Beautified page 23 May 2001
Please see the copyright notice.