writers.com feature:

Email: Electronic Communication

By Paula Guran

Writers on the Net got an email the other day from someone complaining his fellow workers wrote long, often incomprehensible, time-consuming email. He wondered if there were any classes in writing email.

There are an estimated 115 million active email users. That's 115 million people who have, at one time or another, communicated poorly. Maybe we could all use a "refresher" course.

[I'm addressing only electronic communication through email here. Emotional counseling (don't write email when upset, an email "relationship" is not much of a relationship, etc.), netiquette (don't use caps, strip out extraneous info when forwarding, etc.). and the mechanics of emailing ("With a new message window open, select Message>Attach Document or click the Attach Document button on the main toolbar...") are not covered. Nor are we tackling IMs or other "texting."]

Communicating via email is different from communicating on paper. When writing a paper document, we take time to at least try to make everything clear and explicit. Those with whom we are communicating will not have a chance to quickly ask us for clarification and we know it. Email is a relatively rapid exchange and more conversational than paper-based communication. We know, even expect, our recipients to ask questions. We "talk" in email as we do in spoken conversation: informally and untidily.

But with face-to-face conversation our communication is not just verbal, we communicate with gesture, facial expression, posture, even dress and environment. Inflection, intonation, diction, dialect are conveyed in both face-to-face and telephone conversations. All of those ways of expression are lost in email. Emotional and situational tone are missing: Are you being serious or joking? Are you happy or sad? Situational nuance is also missing. Are you rushed and distracted or relaxed and focused? Juggling a laptop in a terminal or sitting in your ergonomically correct chair and desk?

Be aware that there are circumstances, particularly in business communication, in which you must be painstakingly accurate. There are also times you can just dash off a friendly, if somewhat sloppy, message. But, unless you are absolutely sure of your recipient's knowledge of and attitude toward you, you may make the wrong impression if you are too slapdash. An occasional typo won't condemn you, but if you're consistently misspelling words, using non-standard capitalization and punctuation, or garbling your grammar, then you are going to come across in a less-than-positive manner.

Another problem involves structure. Good Web designers think of a Web page in terms of "one screen" at a time: what you see on your screen without needing to scroll down. email shares this same spatial relationship. An average of 350 words (2,000 characters) is safe to consider as one screen of text. (Yes, screens vary widely in both resolution and size, from those on a wireless phone to almost cinematic, but 350 is a good medium.) Those first 350 words are the most important of your email. The second most important words are those at the end of the body of the email. We have a tendency, when reading from the screen, to remember or emphasize the last phrases we see. Make sure you leave a good impression.

With email, as in snail mail, you are trying to convey a meaning from your mind to the mind of your reader. It helps to:

Think of the reader
Write to express thought, not to impress your recipient
Keep your own thinking straight, determine the essential points, get rid of the superfluous
Decide the priority of your points and determine the tone you wish to present them in
You needn't dispense with social niceties completely, a "Hope this finds you well," or "It was nice seeing you the other day," to start off is great. You may want to save inquiring about the health of family, pets, office décor, etc. for later in the email.
Be concise. Use short, direct, simple statements to cover your points and state them in well organized order. When inclined to use "and, but, however, consequently" in the middle of sentences, try putting in a period instead. But remember, being brief does not necessarily mean writing as you would compose a telegram. Being courteous and clear, even if it takes more words, is more important than condensing your message.
Give facts exactly and as completely as is necessary. Be precise and specific.

Our questioner's co-workers are sending him long, disorganized messages because they are trying to supply (sometimes unnecessary) detail and simply haven't enough facility with language to brief but still informative. They can, of course, learn.

There's one other difference between email and paper-media or verbal communication. What you see on your screen is not necessarily what your recipient sees on his/her screen. Your speech sounds about the same to you as to others. Your stationery and handwriting or typeface will not alter in a physical exchange. With email what you see is not necessarily what those who receive the message see. Stick with text-only (ASCII), HTML formatting is simply not compatible with all machines or software. Text-only offers other advantages, too. Text-only email is smaller than HTML email. It's faster to download and takes up less space on your computer. (I just dumped 46.1 MB of unsolicited images and files -- that was only two weeks worth. Quite a bit of it is cutesy email "stationery" at 440K per delivery.) HTML also introduces a number of security and privacy issues that text-only email does not have. Text-only messages can be read with old software, old software, and on portable devices. Want to know more about email?

Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail

email Etiquette

Dynamoo's email Etiquette

How email Works

Copyright (c) 2004 Writers on the Net. This feature was originally published in "Writers.com," the monthly electronic newsletter of Writers on the Net. This publication may not be reproduced in print or posted elsewhere on the Web or used in any other fashion, in whole or in part, without written permission from Writers on the Net/Writers.com. Subscribe here or by emailing writers@writers.com.

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