Body: Style We’ve talked about short paragraphs and short, clear, concise sentences. But there is more to a good email body than that. Use capital letters appropriately, text in all capitals indicates shouting and is perceived as rude. Some people go the opposite way and write emails in all lowercase. That too is just as rude as it means they don’t even care enough to write properly. Use sentence cases correctly. Avoid overusing exclamation marks, your message content should sufficiently express your emotional state. Writing good emails requires attention to spelling and grammar too. Always write grammatically correct sentences, even if you use sentence fragments as I do. And only use fragments when the topic is paragraph delimited. Beware of misspellings, especially names, as the meaning of your message may be lost in anger or confusion. Structure your sentences into paragraphs that make topical sense and use the right language and vocabulary for the topic. There are also things to avoid. Avoid using abbreviations if possible, unless you are using EOM, NNTR or FYI; or if the abbreviation is impossible to confuse and in common use in context. Stay away from emoticons, or use them very sparingly. Beware of the tone of your writing, the recipient cannot read your facial expression and so cannot guess when you are being serious or joking. And lose the attitude. Write to the language and needs of your audience, observe the cultural mores of the group, but try to keep the email personable as well. Use gender neutral phrases wherever possible, you never know to whom the email will be forwarded. Of course, keep your language clean. And for all that is precious, stop using clichés and tautological phrases. Don’t “circle back”, “touch base”, “to be honest”, “at the end of the day”, “I personally”, “at this moment in time”, “it’s a nightmare”, “24/7”, “synergize”, “fairly unique”, or “it’s not rocket science”. These violate the concise rule anyway. Beware of writing emails when angry or emotional. These turn out to be contentious, say nothing of value and do no more than to inflame the recipient, which serves no purpose. If you are angry, and need to express your outrage, take a breath, calm down, and write a reasoned and well argued message instead. It’s easy to forget sometimes that the recipient is an emotional human too. And that these email outbursts are also archived and may be used against you later. Aside: Process and Edit Never bang out an email and hit Send without processing and editing it several times. If you rush it, you will make all the above content and style mistakes, and the recipient will not be happy. Re-read the email several times. Check for consistency, check the grammar, check the spelling, check the tone, check the clarity. Edit it as if you are a New York Times sub-editor to remove padding, fluff, inconsistencies, repetitions and emotional outbursts. Then re-read it again. A trick used by great email writers is to read the email aloud, as if sharing the content verbally with a real person standing in front of them. I don’t mean you should stand up in your cubicle and talk to yourself loudly, just read it using the voice in your head. This trick often helps people see how to improve their content. Responding to Emails Responses As mentioned before, it is expected that the recipient responds when their name is in the TO list and in the greeting, unless the email is tagged as FYI or has a NNTR message. It is however, not expected that the response be instant. If the sender needs an instant response, they would call, text or instant message. Many busy people avoid email interruptions during the day so they can be more productive and schedule time to look at emails later. Or they are in meetings or away from their desks or eating or sitting on a bus. When they do get to their emails, they respond. Do not assume that just because they have an iPhone or Blackberry that they are looking at it all the time. People do have work to do and lives to live outside email. However, as a recipient where a question is asked or an action is expected, you should respond as swiftly as possible, especially if you are in the TO list. That’s assuming you can act or answer. If you can, great, act, answer the email and send the response. If not, send a response anyway to indicate that you will get to it later and when you will act or answer. And make sure you do. Recipients should never be afraid to ask for clarifications before acting or answering, it ensures better communication. Picking up the phone to discuss an email is an acceptable response. Recipients should also answer all the questions posed, or perform all the actions requested in the response; or do none of the above and explain why in their response. Responses, like new email messages, need to be concise and to the point. They also need to be clear, full sentences, grammatically correct, not contain bad language or attitude, checked and edited. The role of sender and recipient are reversed, but the etiquette remains the same. Senders, remember that slow and short responses are not rude. The recipient is a busy person too, and it did take time to read your email, formulate a response, review it, edit it and send it. Appreciate any and all responses. There are also times when a response is completely unnecessary. There is no need to send a “Thank You” to a clear and simple response (in fact there is quite a controversy whether “Thank You” emails are even good etiquette). For example, if a response to an invitation is “I’m coming”, there is no need to respond to that. If the response is “I’m coming, what can I bring?”, you do need to respond to that. Never ever respond to spam or phishing or emails where you cannot verify the sender. It usually tells them that your email address is good and they’ll either spoof it or nail you with more spam emails. Reply vs Reply-All Short version, avoid reply-all. If you are not in the TO line, most certainly never reply-all. If you need to submit a reply, sender only. If you are on the TO line, still consider reply instead of reply-all. If you are seeking clarification, reply to sender only, others have no need to see that discussion. If you are the wrong person to answer, reply to sender only. If it’s an invitation, reply to sender only. The only time reply-all is acceptable is when the answers to the questions posted are needed by the entire group, and the CC group is small. Still consider replying just to the sender and letting them forward on the parts they believe the group should know. It’s unfortunate that the reply-all has been so overused such that senders assume all email replies are replies-to-all and they have to do nothing further in the email conversation. Remember, recipients on the CC line are less likely to read an email, and replies-to-all are even less likely than that to be read. A fresh email from the sender containing additional information is more likely to be read and actioned. If you do start following good email etiquette using reply instead of reply-all, use your greeting line to reinforce that the response is a reply by only greeting the sender by name as if it were a person-to-person email. That should trigger in their minds that you did not reply-all and that they need to look at your response and act on it on behalf of the group. Aside: Quoting One of the common problems with emails and responses and responses to responses is that the discussion chain gets long and hard to follow. Additional recipients may get added, and the conversation may branch off in many different directions. Feel for the poor new recipient that has a 20 email discussion chain to catch up on. They have better things to do. The solution to this issue is quoting. Instead of replying to the email chain, quote the relevant parts of it. When the chain gets three or more emails deep, summarize and start a new one. Quoting is simple, and there are two common ways to do it. The first way is to start a new email chain and summarize the discussion so far after writing the action or questions (or quote only relevant paragraphs from the chain and edit out the rest). That way, the new recipient has a context in which to work and they can catch up quickly. Always use this way when adding new recipients to a discussion instead of sending the whole chain (and it’s OK to FYI CC the old chain’s recipients). The second method of quoting is to strip out only the questions from the email and respond below each, removing all the other text and attachments from the response email (called interleaved posting). For example, if you receive: