Sunday 3 March 2013
Bad Email -3
Bulky Paragraphs
People don’t read e-mails, they skim. So don’t
write an eight sentence paragraph in one chunk. Here’s some guidelines:
More than six lines?
Split it up.
Important information? Make it a one-line
paragraph.
Multiple pieces of important information? Make a
quick bulleted list. (Like this one)
Bag email -2
Sending Urgent Requests through E-Mail
My guideline is that I shouldn’t send an e-mail if I need a response in less than five days. Not only do some people take days to respond to e-mails, you won’t be able to convey urgency in text. When you are on the phone or in person, you can transmit the impending need of your request, while in text you can only resort to using CAPITAL LETTERS or exclamation marks!
Bad Email
Trying to Be Clever
Don’t try to be witty or sarcastic in an e-mail and pretend as if everything you say will be taken literally. Although a few metaphors can come across well in an e-mail, most don’t. The person on the other side can’t tell with what intensity or emphasis you typed the words. If anything can be ambiguous, reword it and leave it out.
And don’t think using emoticons gives you the green-light to be clever and charming. A symbol can’t replace the hundreds of different varieties in voice, tone and gestures you normally use to communicate intentions.
Good Email-3
The
use of email has definite social implications, although there isn't always agreement
on what they are. Here are some views which seem to have currency in the
literature:
1.
In the absence of such
inter-personal communication cues as gestures, intonation, eye movement, and so
forth, email communication is more easily misinterpreted than one might have
predicted in the 1970's. This phenomenon added a new term, flaming, to our
working vocabulary.
2.
Email can remove social
distance as well as geographical distance as it suppresses status cues. This is
both a blessing and a curse (see below).
3.
Email can support and
sustain communities of interest.
4.
Email can be a weapon in
organizational politics.
To be sure, there is a
healthy body of literature which speaks to a variety of other social effects of
email - in some cases, inconclusively. There is evidence that email
communication may both produce and ameliorate anomic communication
partnerships; email both contributes to and helps overcome the user's feeling
of isolation; email is sometimes impersonal and sometimes not; and email may
both increase and decrease sociability in communication. All of these are
important areas of study, and equally beyond present purposes.
Because of these
benefits, the popularity of email soared. By some estimates, there are over 50
million email users, and that number appears to be growing by 25% per year. But this growth is
not without discomfort
Good Email-2
Email's double-blind processing - the sender doesn't
know how message is being handled and the receiver doesn't know the
circumstances under which the message was sent - creates a kind of processing
hierarchy at both ends according to the degree of automation applied. Sender's
can personally craft the message, delegate authorship, prepare from a
boilerplate, etc., while receivers can delete-without-reading, completely read
without responding, skim with or without response, and so forth.
Good Email
Email is a time manager's dream come true - user's have virtually complete control over their end of the communication partnership.
-When
compared to communication alternatives, email turns out to be on the low side
on bandwidth, but in some contexts in makes up for the low bandwidth with its
considerable velocity. This makes it especially useful for short, focussed
communication and less so for lengthy diatribes.
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