Has this ever happened to you?
You send an email asking a question that can help you in completing a confidential matter. You are nice, you ask for the information but do not reveal to much information you are acing discreetly. The receiver that you sent the question sends you a note asking for more information. You reply in a discreet manner and restate the questions and still the receiver won’t get the hint that you can not tell the complete story. The receiver of the question then with
holds the critical piece of information because the just have to know everything.
I understand that we live in a “me, me, me world” but holding information hostage…what is this about? When did it become okay to be rude because you are using e-mail to communicate?
When I learned to write letter it was okay to be discrete, address people in a professional or formal manner, and ask for information from the receiver in a nice way. When I began writing e-mails I carried these same letter writing skills into my electronic communications.
According to E-mail Etiquette posted by emailaddresses.com the first contact with other people will often be through email and many may never actually meet them face to face, you might well end up having a productive ongoing email relationship with them for years. This reason alone dictates that we need to be especially cautious in our digital communications.
If you need a good reason to use proper e-mail etiquette in New Zealand a woman wh
o was fired for Poor E-mail Etiquette. Her “confrontational” e-mails which broke good etiquette practices by using uppercase characters, bold fonts, and red lettering was considered to be a form of harassment. Although they eventually overturned her termination this e-mail diva she should realize that she needs to adhere to proper e-mail etiquette and that most often it is not the message but the delivery of the message that is inappropriate.
To help those who may need some information about proper e-mail etiquette check out about.com for their Top 26 Most Important Rules of Email Etiquette or ebooks online for a wonderful book by Samantha Miller called E-Mail Etiquette: Do's, Don'ts and Disaster Tales from People Magazine's Internet Manners Expert
You send an email asking a question that can help you in completing a confidential matter. You are nice, you ask for the information but do not reveal to much information you are acing discreetly. The receiver that you sent the question sends you a note asking for more information. You reply in a discreet manner and restate the questions and still the receiver won’t get the hint that you can not tell the complete story. The receiver of the question then with
holds the critical piece of information because the just have to know everything.I understand that we live in a “me, me, me world” but holding information hostage…what is this about? When did it become okay to be rude because you are using e-mail to communicate?
When I learned to write letter it was okay to be discrete, address people in a professional or formal manner, and ask for information from the receiver in a nice way. When I began writing e-mails I carried these same letter writing skills into my electronic communications.
According to E-mail Etiquette posted by emailaddresses.com the first contact with other people will often be through email and many may never actually meet them face to face, you might well end up having a productive ongoing email relationship with them for years. This reason alone dictates that we need to be especially cautious in our digital communications.
If you need a good reason to use proper e-mail etiquette in New Zealand a woman wh
o was fired for Poor E-mail Etiquette. Her “confrontational” e-mails which broke good etiquette practices by using uppercase characters, bold fonts, and red lettering was considered to be a form of harassment. Although they eventually overturned her termination this e-mail diva she should realize that she needs to adhere to proper e-mail etiquette and that most often it is not the message but the delivery of the message that is inappropriate.To help those who may need some information about proper e-mail etiquette check out about.com for their Top 26 Most Important Rules of Email Etiquette or ebooks online for a wonderful book by Samantha Miller called E-Mail Etiquette: Do's, Don'ts and Disaster Tales from People Magazine's Internet Manners Expert
I am definitely an advocate for the use of e-mail ettiquette, but the case of the woman loosing her job over an e-mail being capitalized and in another color is outrageous. That is not a good enough reason to fire a person. They should have warned her. Individuals just need to use common sense and adapt their writing style to various situations. Look at who you are writing to. If it is an important person and not a close friend, then make sure to use correct grammar and punctuation and use a professional tone of voice. It all comes down to common sense.
ReplyDeleteBrenda -
ReplyDeleteInteresting topic! I like the lists of email etiquette tips on about.com and others. One of those tips that I can't stress enough is cleaning up forwards before sending them to other people. That is one of my top pet peeves. I hate having to scroll through so many email addresses and blank spaces. I just want to read the main body. That is part of the reason that I usually end up deleting the forwards right away when I get them. I think that using different fonts or colors is fine when creating a unique, fun email, but professional emails should be left in black, regular fonts.
This is a great topic you picked to blog about. With more and more people using email, they seem to get careless as it is easy to produce and send an email within minutes. Taking the time to make sure that it is not confrontational or even written with poor grammar is very important. It not only can be documented and saved for who knows how long, but it then can be used against you like in the example you stated about the women who used capital letters and red font and it was interpreted as harassing. I am actually taking a class right now and we are learning on proper etiquette for emails and how to re-write an email from a business owner to a client to make sure it is proper. Snail mail is fading but that doesn’t mean the rules we learned about writing a letter can’t follow with us into the new digital aged world.
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