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Even after deleting all
spam and other unsolicited junk, I get a lot of e-mail. Sometimes a
student is looking for technical assistance. Sometimes it's an
invitation to a social event. Do you get as many jokes as I do? I'll bet
you do. After dealing with this for several decades, I've come to
notice some patterns about email usage, some good and some bad.
Here are some ways to keep your computer image
healthy. Following simple rules of etiquette and courtesy will give you
a better image among your correspondents.
Never send an email when you are angry. This
is called "flaming" and is poor form at best. Wait a day or two and
then have someone look at what you wrote before sending it out. At the
same time, avoid sarcasm. It rarely accomplishes anything useful.
DON'T USE ALL UPPERCASE! The computer
community considers this the electronic equivalent of shouting. How
would you like it if someone thought that the only way to get his point
across to you was by screaming in your ear?
Avoid ending sentences with multiple
exclamation points or question marks. If you hear the same word repeated
over and over, it tends to lose its meaning. Excessive punctuation is
no different.
If you would like others to think well of
you, put clear and plainly stated information in the subject line. This
will help people to decide if your message is urgent or if it can wait
until later.
Long emails can be time wasting and
irritating. If it takes more than a few paragraphs to state your point,
consider a wonderful electronic invention that's directly connected to
the most sophisticated communications network in human history. It's
called a telephone.
I appreciate a funny story or a good joke as
much as anyone, but sometimes the sheer volume of this kind of email can
be overwhelming. If you must send this kind of stuff, do it rarely.
If you receive an email warning you about a
brand new virus, please don't send it out to "everyone you know". These
things are almost always hoaxes, and they do nothing but waste
everyone's time and clog up the internet while squandering bandwidth.
Understand the difference between Reply and
Reply All. If you want to reply only to Joe who sent you the message,
press the Reply button. If you want to reply to Joe and to everyone
else, click on the Reply All button.
Understand the difference between Send and
Send All. Sometimes it can be too easy to send email. Do you want to
send a love note to that
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cute co-worker? Then press the Send button.
Pressing Send All will guarantee that "cutie pie" and everyone else in
the company gets the message too. Wars have started over less.
Don't be too quick to press Send. At the very
minimum use your spell checker, but don't rely on the spell checker to
catch grammatical mistakes. I recently received a flyer from a real
estate agent alerting me to "Resent Sales" in my neighborhood. The agent
used the spell checker, but obviously didn't proof the document. She
meant to say "Recent Sales," but the damage had already been done to her
professional image.
All this is merely to point out that email is
almost like conversation. We use it so much on a daily basis that we
don't really think about it. Email, however, has its own rules of
etiquette and courtesy, just as in normal speech with others. We have
seen there are additional considerations with communicating by the
written word. Reflecting upon them can make using email more effective
and much more satisfying to you and the people you email.
That's enough of the serious stuff. Let's turn
to something that's not only educational, but useful. You have very
likely received email with a lot of the ">" formatting characters
embedded in the message. Anyone you forward this to will get even more
added to the note. Have mercy and eliminate all these and other
extraneous characters from your email messages. This is very easy to do,
but not at all obvious.
Start by highlighting the email text. You do
this by dragging your mouse over the text while holding down the left
mouse button.
From the Edit menu on your toolbar, select Copy.
Open your favorite word processor and paste it into a new document.
Then use the word processor's Search and
Replace tool. Some word processors list it under Find, and some simply
show Replace. However it's listed, you will find it in the Edit menu.
In the Search box, type in the character you wish to remove and put nothing in the Replace box.
After you've removed all the extra characters
from the text, simply copy and paste it back into an email and send it
on to whomever you wish.
Thanks for practicing good email etiquette.
Permission to reprint is granted only to other
non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the
author and our publication.
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