email essentials

In the latest New York Review of Books, the divine Janet Malcolm reviews Send: the Essential Guide to Email for Home and Office.

Why a guide? Malcolm nails the problem of email: Email is a medium of bad writing. Poor word choice is the norm—as is tone deafness. The problem of tone is, of course, the problem of all writing. There is no “universal default tone.” When people wrote letters they had the same blank screen to fill. And there were the same boneheads among them who alienated correspondents with their ghastly oblivious prose.

I agree that, in terms of how emails are written, there shouldn’t be much of a difference with any other form of communication. But there is.

When I went online for the first time over a decade ago, my best friend, aged 55 at the time, who’d beat me to it by a month, told me that apparently there were all sorts of email conventions that we needed to learn (and writing conventions we needed to unlearn) - we didn’t have to bother with an introductory greeting (Dear So-and-So), needn’t worry about paragraphs, capitals, even spelling mistakes. She sounded puzzled but determined to get it right.

I started emailing and wrote my emails in the same way that I’d written letters all my life - Dear Whoever, How are you? I’m writing to tell you, etc, etc. I waited for the email etiquette sky to fall in, but it didn’t.

Okay, I soon became adept at sending one-line replies to email and in particularly pressurised moments would skip the ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and not bother to sign my name. But all these years and thousands of emails later, at work I still stick to minimal conventions, even on one-liners, with a ‘hi’ at the beginning of the line and my name at the end (or an initial if time’s tight.) In my own writing mind, I make little distinction between email and letters, except for the rapidity of email.

Maybe it’s this sticking with convention which has meant I haven’t yet committed any email bloopers, though I have had one committed against me. Years ago I belonged to an email discussion list which for the most part got along fine, though we’d recently run into stormy weather. In the middle of debating a contentious issue, someone posted a dismissive comment about me which had clearly been intended to go privately to another list member - but instead they’d hit “reply all’ and the entire list got to read it. It wasn’t a categorically awful remark, though I did feel a bit hurt and embarrassed when I read it — though probably not nearly as embarrassed as the sender.

Ever since, if I’m writing an email which is in any way sensitive, whether to a friend or public group, I check and double check the Address box, to make sure I’m not making that basic mistake.

I have an 85 year old friend who tells me he writes (by hand) at least one letter a day. On an average day I send at least five emails and on the average work day I might send 100.

It’s the rapidity of email and the technology’s ability to send our words to many people at once — including strangers — which is the sting in email’s tail and which makes books like Send necessary — though personally, I’d never read an email guide. I’d much rather read Janet Malcolm’s elegantly written review.

Comments

[elsewhere]

Wow, I'm really impressed by your eight-five year old friend. sadly, i hardly write a letter or even a personal email these days. It's blogging all the way.