Once again, I am fighting the good fight against the skin cancer on my nose. The dang stuff just keeps popping up and the doctors keep scooping out hunks of flesh to send off for biopsy. Thus, I am working a lot from home via email. And once again, I am reminded how important a well written email is for the reader and for efficiency.
This is not the first time I’ve written about email etiquette. About a year ago I wrote a 3- minute blog on how to compose a nice email. I just re-read it and was impressed. The advice still holds up. Please, dear lord, would every emailer do us all a favor and read it!
A quick review of the 10 tips in my past blog post:
- Leave the joking to GIF’s and Emojis
- Never start an email with sorry. If you must apologize put it at the end.
- Use nouns and proper words (replace all “its” with a noun)
- Please, please, please write in complete sentences. You may know what you’re saying but that doesn’t mean the reader does.
- Change the subject line to reflect what is in the email.
- Use hyperlinks to help the reader.
- Make sure your contact information is in your signature.
- Keep it short and concise. Our eyes, that stare at screens all day, thank you.
- If the email you’re writing is important, get some help from Microsoft WORD. Type your email in WORD, use their spell and grammar check, then copy and paste your new word.doc into the body of your email.
- And above all, be polite.
For a full explanation of the above rules, read last year’s blog, please!
Sincerely yours,
Kerry McCoy
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