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12.10

E-mail 101: Tips to Consider Before You Hit Send...

E-mail is a lot like Superman:

Faster than a speeding bullet? You bet. It can go across the globe in seconds.

Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound? It can do better than that, soaring to a satellite and returning to earth in a couple blinks of an eye.

More powerful than a locomotive? Yep. An e-mail can have a greater impact than an Unstoppable train.

Love it or hate it, e-mail is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. It has been called the killer app of the Internet for good reason: it is the most widely used Internet application. (Now you Gen Y’ers know where the word “app” comes from. And you thought it had something to do with your iPhone.)

How prevalent is e-mail? Consider these 2009 facts from Pingdom, a global Web site and server uptime monitoring service:

• 90 trillion – The number of e-mails sent on the Internet

• 247 billion – Average number of e-mail messages per day

• 1.4 billion – The number of e-mail users worldwide

• 100 million – New e-mail users since the year before

• 81% – The percentage of e-mails that were spam

• 200 billion – The number of spam e-mails per day (assuming 81 percent are spam)

With that amount of e-mail traffic, there are bound to be miscommunications and misinterpretations. Let’s see how a more effective use of e-mail can reduce spam, while also enhancing your career prospects.

Using E-Mail to Convey a Professional Image

E-mail between friends and co-workers can be much less formal than a traditional letter. We all send out electronic messages without common e-mail salutations like “Hi,” “Hey” or “Hello.” And we often don’t sign our e-mails. But when you’re talking about a business e-mail, particularly to someone in another organization, you should strive to be more formal because your communication reflects upon you and your company.

For example, you have a much better chance of convincing someone how good you or your organization would be as a business partner if your e-mail is well-written. This includes good grammar, adherence to a commonly accepted style and properly spelled words. Spell-check is easy to use on most e-mail programs, but how often do you see misspelled words in a message from a business colleague or someone hoping to influence your actions and decisions? Probably too much.

A poorly written and mistake-filled e-mail could indicate that your company pays little attention to detail and performs sloppy work. Conversely, a well-written missive that you checked over closely before you hit the send button speaks highly of your company and shows that you care about details. It’s doing the little things well that separates top performers from also-rans. With whom would you want to form a business relationship?

“Using active, concise, specific language and plain English will go a long way toward making sure that your writing communicates clearly and forcefully,” wrote Janis Fisher Chan in her 2005 book, E-mail: A Write It Well Guide, How to Write and Manage E-Mail in the Workplace. “Communicating clearly and conveying a professional image also requires paying attention to the way you construct sentences.”

Lost Productivity

A poorly written e-mail can cause so much confusion among recipients that they have to spend time seeking clarification. Consider the following e-mail that was cited in a Dec. 2004 New York Times article, "What Corporate America Can’t Build: A Sentence":

“i need help i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you.”

As poorly constructed and devoid of punctuation as this e-mail is, at least you can probably understand what message the writer was trying to convey. The same is not true of the following, also from the Times article:

“I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL — JBL has the indicator as B ???? — I wanted to make sure with the recent changes — I processed today — before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to ‘C’.”

This e-mail was so bad that the writer was sent for remedial writing instruction. Companies spend billions on such training each year.

So, if an employer has two people, equally talented in their technical skills but one communicates well and one doesn’t, who is he or she going to consider more valuable? If layoffs are looming, who is more likely to stick around?

E-Mail Syndromes

Are you one of those people who likes to hit “Reply All” on every return e-mail? If so, then you could be suffering from Reply All Syndrome. While replying to everyone is the proper course of action when you have information that all should know, often times people reply to everyone when only the original e-mail author needs an answer.

For example, if you’re reminded of a staff meeting, does everyone really know that you can’t make it because your dog is getting a flea dip? Probably not. When you’re thanking that person for the reminder, does everyone in your office have to know that you said thank you? We all receive enough unwanted and unsolicited e-mails without getting spammed by someone we know.

Another thing that reduces e-mail effectiveness is Same Subject Line Syndrome. This is when you respond to an e-mail with a completely different thought without changing the subject line. This is akin to a newspaper running the same headline on two different stories. The danger in not using a new subject line — particularly in an e-mail that was originally sent to many people — is that your intended recipient might ignore it, thinking that one of the more recent e-mails in the string was sufficient to bring him or her up to date.

So whether you’re crafting a new e-mail or responding to one, try to come up with a subject line that reflects the contents of the communication and captures the reader’s attention. This is what headline writers do. After all, if your subject line isn’t interesting or provocative, the reader might not open your e-mail. Then, no matter how strong your content is, it won’t convey anything or bring about a desired course of action if it goes unread.

Effective e-mail communication is important and can be key to your career survival and advancement. Today’s most common form of business communication is also the one that many people need to work on the most.

Superman might not have needed e-mail but the rest of us do.

Did you know that IEEE Senior Member Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing and sending the first e-mail in 1971?

 

Chris McManes is IEEE-USA’s public relations manager.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.