A Beginner's Guide to Effective Email

Summary

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

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Here, 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

Hopefully these suggestions will be useful to you as you start your emailing career! :-)

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Go on to Acronyms and Jargon

Go back to the beginning
Go back to Greetings and Signatures

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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

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Please see the copyright notice.