They say the best lessons learned in life are often those
that happen when we make mistakes. If that’s true than I have
learned an awful lot of lessons very well.
The latest lesson has to do with e-mails. So I send out this
e-mail and I get this reply:
“Please stop yelling at me!!!” Yelling at me? Hello? This is
an e-mail not a recording. It has no life, it is an inanimate
object, it can neither yell, breath or eat peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches. This is a bunch of words strung together and
sent over an invisible network that I can’t see and magically
appears on your computer screen. If I wanted to scream at you I
would have picked up the phone and let her rip!
The message went on to say, “it’s obvious you feel very
passionate about your response.” So what makes you think I’m
passionate????? Yep, those multiple exclamation marks. Multiple
anything is bad, very bad!!! Heck, I just hit the stupid thing
too many times.
And finally the recipient of my e-mail ended by reminding me
that it is extremely rude to send an e-mail using a gimmicky
font any larger than 10 points. What! Is this some kind of
basketball game? “Ruechel turns and fades and hits a 10-pointer
from 40 feet.” The truth is I use a larger 14-point Arial BOLD
font because I’m half blind and can’t read any e-mail smaller
than 12 points, okay? And once I get started I have a problem
with any e-mail shorter than about 5-thousand words. And that’s
where I usually get into trouble.
Now, in the interest of science, the advancement of humanity
in general, and in the name of saving you the embarrassment and
social degradation that comes from poor e-mail etiquette, I
present to you some simple rules taken from two internet web
sites that seem to know what they are talking about:
www.penmachine.com and
www.emailreplies.com.
These are the ten most important in my opinion.
- Do not write in all CAPITAL letters. It’s like YELLING
AT YOUR BOSS complete with those embarrassing little
meteorites of spittle that fly off your lips at the most in
opportune moments.
- Do not use multiple exclamation or question marks. Those
marks imply that you are inflexible and overheated about a
subject.
- Do not try to be cute and joke about subjects unless you
know the recipient extremely well and are prepared to be
misunderstood.
- Do not set ultimatums or make threats are attract
attention using words like URGENT and IMPORTANT because you
can’t take those words back when your e-mail is neither
urgent or important.
- Do not forward e-mails that may contain anything
libelous, defamatory, offensive, racist or obscene. Even
though you may not have written the forwarded e-mail the
fact you passed it on makes it your own.
- Be concise and to the point.
- Answer all questions, and pre-empt further questions by
replying to the e-mail as quickly as possible. Customers or
bosses send e-mails because they want a quick response. If
time is of little concern they’ll send a snail-mail letter.
- Treat your e-mail like a letter with proper grammar,
punctuation and spelling.
- Never send an e-mail when you are angry. It tends to
leak through in the writing, you dirty rat, no matter how
careful you are.
- If in doubt --- don’t send the e-mail. Better to stop,
take a breath, re-write and save yourself embarrassment and
possibly a client and maybe your job.
DID YOU GET ALL THAT? I hope so.
Respectfully submitted,
Me… the King of e-mail mistakes.
