E-mail Etiquette
Sending e-mail that’s looks good is a reflection of your professionalism. And an e-mail that is properly written not only makes you look good, but is easier for your recipients to read which will win you lots of points with that individual. Finally, if you send an e-mail that looks good, you also look like you know your way around the computer and the Internet.
Here are some tips to writing a winning e-mail:
- MANY READERS DON’T LIKE ALL CAPS. IT’S HARD TO READ AND SEEMS LIKE YOU’RE SHOUTING!
- use punctuation its hard to read stuff that doesnt have any commas capital letters periods or apostrophes
- Usee yur spall chacker. Its annyang to try to reede constent spalling misstakes.
- When forwarding an e-mail to someone, copy and paste what you want to send into a new e-mail then send it off. This is especially true if you had to dig through tons of “layers” to actually get to the message of the e-mail.
- Be courteous enough to use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) when forwarding an email to everyone in your address book. You don’t want the addresses of your friends to get sent around the net. We sent a tip out on how to do this back on 5/27/2004
- Avoid embedding sounds or using “stationary” in your messages. I know it’s cute and we’re guilty of showing you how to do it, but they take longer to download and can be annoying to your recipient. Additionally, when your recipient responds to your e-mail, they may have to re-format their text (especially color ) in order for it to be readable.
- Remember that attachments over 50k are annoyingly long to download, possibly causing your recipient’s connection to “time-out”, or the email could even be blocked. Try to keep those files manageable!
- Re-read your e-mail message before you send it out. I don’t know how many times I thought I had everything just right then found something that was way out of place when I re-read the document.
- When replying to a message, don’t quote back the entire message if you are just responding to one or two points. Just include what you are responding to.
- Finally, don’t use short hand. Stuff like “r u going to stp by ltr” can be hard to read. Don’t B lzy, typ the whole wrd.
Well, I guess that’s about it. I know that I occasionally have an e-mail transgression (I think we all do), but maybe these guidelines will help everyone communicate a little better. Remember, these are just suggested guidelines—most of our readers live in free countries, so email any way you want.
~ Steve