I wish more people would read and follow this how to. Though I still think that top posting is wrong under most circumstances. I’m just old fashioned that way, from the days before AOL and Microsoft ruined email.
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Great advice for the old farts.
BTW, what’s a paragraph?
Agree with most, disagree with some; stopped reading at “Reply All”. I agree with the point, but totally disagree with the style.
If you hit Reply All first, you run the very real risk of sending information to people, who don’t need it or want it. Because of the way AOL/Microsoft/etc does it, you should be able to do what is stated at the link safely. However, you could write your email first, and then fill in the To/CC portion, to make sure you don’t inadvertently send information to the wrong people. If you need the full distribution list, open a second copy of the email and cut and paste (either distribution to written email or written email to the distribution).
I’ve seen very thoughtful emails sent to too large a distribution; followed by literally hundreds of responses of, “why did I get this?” The latter are the truly stupid that should be punished, but the originator could have avoided the problem.
I’ve always replied to email using the “point” system as opposed to a paragraph up top.
This web page addresses one of my pet peeves in web fora – people will start a thread with a subject line like:
“A Question”
or
“What do you think about this?”
or
“Need Advice”
I hate that…..
And I learned something from the web page – put the action items up top. Good idea.
Someone was really rude to me because I made the mistake of “top posting” (well, I made the mistake of bothering to email them in the first place). Anyway,this person decided to call me names because I hadn’t followed his strict emailing rules (which I hadn’t known about, but apparently he was a Very Important Person whose likes and dislikes should be researched thoroughly). So from now on I will top post to everyone. I spell everything correctly and use proper grammar; people can be satisfied with that. (Also I don’t “reply all” unless it’s a work matter and I’m at work using the work email, and I don’t thoughtlessly email huge chain emails or giant attachments — I hardly ever email anyone.)
Okay, in reality I will not always “top post” unless the email is short to begin with; if it’s a long email with several points to address like as not I’ll cut it up properly. I’m a stickler for grammar and so on, usually. But I consider it rude to call people names and attack them because they didn’t send me a properly formatted email. Life is too short.
Gee Andrea, did you email Matula?
Oh no. I never email anyone. I replied to an email someone (not from this blog’s comment section) sent to me. Big mistake. I attempted conversation. I got back “you stupid top poster” (paraphrased). There are so many worse things in the world than someone who emails you with your text at the top. (For instance, there is Matula’s insistence on using his [[[brackets of doom]]] to quote someone, which he insists that are from some antique bbs or something he used to belong to, and which he refuses to stop using even though it is irritating as hell, and if he wants to be antique he can just use good old-fashioned quotation marks.)
Argh, I should have written “someone who emails you with their text at the top.” I’ve had two cups off coffee — obviously I need more.
I also find it useful if the subject actually contains the crucial keywords.
This is an extension of the:
Name-of-event, Save the date!, DATE request.
That is: Include the name of the organization in the name of the event. “Dance!” is mildly informative. “Joe’s Martial Arts Free Meet-and-greet Dance!” = better.
This isn’t an issue with larger organizations – they have coherent email used for official communications, etc. But for parent organizations (or whatever), the emails are often from jj465@comcast.net or otherwise lacking in info. Yes, the half-the-group that’s friends with jj know immediately who that is. But half don’t know jj is the coordinator, etc.
Oh, bs. Who died and elected “Matt.Might” the email deity? Email is about the only viable form of thoughtful communication we have left in this thoroughly beTwittered age. Why should I keep email to five sentences? How about he keep his blog posts to one screenful?
Meh. I disagree entirely with his major thesis, which won’t surprise anyone. He’s giving advice about brevity when what he should be talking about is thinking out carefully what you’re saying, and particularly thinking about making it as easy as possible for the recipient to understand you.
If you focus on brevity without improving your forethought and organization — and I know plenty who do — the result is far worse, because it leads to an endless chain of short e-mails in which clarification is extracted.
To: bob-1 From: bob-2 Subject: Send Frank last Friday’s numbers!
To: bob-2 From: bob-1 Subject: Which numbers?
To: bob-1 From: bob-2 Subject: Those we discussed Friday!
To: bob-2 From: bob-1 Subject: But we talked about both actual and projected.
To: bob-1 From: bob-2 Subject: Actual and projected WHAT?
To: bob-2 From: bob-1 Subject: Sales.
To: bob-1 From: bob-2 Subject: Actual sales.
To: bob-2 From: bob-1 Subject: Which Frank?
YAAAAARG.
Personally, I loathe the tendency of correspondents to treat e-mail as if it’s the equivalent of a conversation snippet, because it neglects the substantial cost of an unknown turn-around time. Sure, if we both happen to be sitting in front of the computer with nothing better to do, we can very rapidly exchange e-mail snippets like we would sentences in conversation. But how likely is that? And if that is our situation — why not pick up the damn phone and call? Or IM? Or something which really is real-time? If we’re exchanging e-mail, that typically means we’re not both at the computer, so there’s going to be some unknown (possilbly lengthy) turnaround time for any necessary follow-up.
When you send an actual letter, you realize turnaround time is nontrivial, so you focus on sending everything your recipient needs to make a decision without further communication. I like this! Yes, if you just babble on, without good organization, your letter might be pages long. So what? I can read a typical 10-word sentence in less than 1.0s. If you send me 12 extra useless sentences, that costs me — 12 seconds! Oh dear. But if you don’t send me 12 very important sentences clarifying what you mean, it will take me way, way longer than 12 seconds to get that information from you.
So I have no truck with brevity per se. Write so that your correspondent is in no doubt whatsoever of what you know, what you want, what you mean. By all means organize your thoughts well, which obviously implies leaving out stuff that is useless or poorly expressed.
Maybe that’s what the author meant to say: not “write briefly above all else” but “write with more forethought and organization above all else, which naturally leads to brevity where brevity is functional.”
In which case, he should have taken his own advice before dashing off his thoughts in print.
So there. Yes, it has been an annoying Tuesday.
Geez, and the author, a relatively junior computer scientist, has a ten-page CV in which he notes that his personal hobbies include SCUBA and martial arts, and that he’s taken a year of Arabic.
I believe Matthew (7:3) has some pithy commentary on this.
Sorry, but I was taught to write in paragraphs, so I will continue to do so. If you want me to reply to your email with a list of points, I’ll just send you a Power Point slide. If you want a thoughtful exchange of ideas, expect to read whole paragraphs.
I’ve been sending email according to my own rules since 1995, and those rules have evolved over time. The only one I insist everyone use when emailing to me is to remove any broomsticks from their asses.
Having my own domain and knowing how to administer it, I can blacklist anyone who violates that rule. <Vogon poetry> See if I dont! </Vogon poetry>
Email clients need to start including hover text or other helpful information that explains what BCC means. The assumption that most people know how it works is now dead.
I lean toward Carl’s position, incidentally, since I have come to rely on email’s capability to not only contain complete discussions of complex matters, but also to serve as a record of such discussions for future reference.
I don’t like having to rely on the spoken word precisely because if one or the other of us doesn’t catch everything — and more to the point, doesn’t realize he’s missed something during the original conversation — there’s that additional turnaround where he has to catch the other person free to talk.
I can read and answer email at my leisure and I never liked being at the beck and call of anyone blindly reaching out and touching me for reasons I can’t prioritize before engaging.
“Many of the tips below are already widely followed in academia, where debate and discussion over email have been taking place for decades.”
Does he mean about or by where he uses over? I would email him but I think he would be rude to me for pointing out his lack of clarity.
“Many of the tips below are already widely followed in academia, where debate and discussion over email have been taking place for decades.”
Yes, but the arguments in academia are so strident because the stakes are so low. In the real world, effective communication counts for more than any list of “rules” drafted by someone I’ve never heard of and of whose opinion I couldn’t care less about.
Okay, I went to the website and started to read it, and stopped at this:
Yes it is. The “e” stands for “electronic” and after that there is the word “mail.” “E” (electronic) “mail.” If he doesn’t like it — well, too bad. He doesn’t get to recreate reality to suit his own likes and dislikes.
Didn’t bother reading the rest.
Conciseness trumps brevity.
I have to see his evidence on the opportunity cost of email vs mail, really don’t see the cost difference between 1 short email or 10 emails. Short of the cost of the recipient might spend more time reading 100 emails a day than 10 or so letters.
For the most part i think this advice is to his students sort of “I get tons of emails try to do what ever you can before you email me, ask questions of google or what ever resource you can before you send me, if you have code run it yourself leave me alone. If you do email me keep it to short to 5 easily distinguishable points so i can quickly skim my email and reply to emails that are worthy. “
Oh, Bull. If he wants points, he can use twitter.
Just what the world needed. An e-mail Nazi.
In the thousands and thousands of e-mails I’ve sent, both personal and business e-mails, I’ve never had anyone COMPLAIN about the format, form or paragraphs of my e-mails. I’m pretty sure IF during a business e-mail, and reply sequence, some boob started ‘grading’ my e-mails, I’d cut them loose and look for someone other than them with whom to do business.
I’m with Engineer here, this is ONE PERSON’s idea of how it should be done, for HIS liking and ease of doing HIS job. Which, IMO, makes it HIS opinion of how it should be done.
I think the point is on his head.
I prefer the method of responding to a point…but I do it with paragraphs. I don’t think “point response” implies bullets/Power Point. What it does is focus the paragraph(s) on the issue.
Al Says:
“Conciseness trumps brevity.”
“Eschew Surplusage”
Mark Twain
Andrea Harris Said:
“Oh no. I never email anyone. I replied to an email someone (not from this blog’s comment section) sent to me. Big mistake. I attempted conversation. I got back “you stupid top poster” (paraphrased).”
Think of it as stepping on an obsolete land-mine left over from prehistoric usenet flamewars… Don’t take “no top posting!” fanatics seriously. All they do is show their age and inflexibility. A simple well-labelled chronological inversion causes them severe mental distress, poor things.
Some of them even pursue this ancient inbred-clan vendetta via blogs, which is deliciously ironic, most-recent-first “blog order” being the definition of top-posting… (gd&r!)
Oh I don’t take them seriously. Once someone reveals themselves as an Insignificant Rules Nazi I cease all communication. Life is too short.
Depends on how many Insignificant Rules they get all hot and bothered about. One or two can be just harmless eccentricity – more fun then sometimes to stick around and poke occasional fun at them. ‘Specially if they’re old friends… I hear you on Life is too short, but the other side of that is, new old friends are hard to come by.
I guess I always responded to whoever the audience was. If more than one person, I used techniques either most common or influential with the most key personnel I was communicating.
Sometimes top first was confusing to people.
Sometimes people wanted a history of previous discussions.
Sometimes people wanted my views separate.
Sometimes people could better read my views in response to previous discussions.
Sometimes, I was the originator and none of the above applied.
My beef is with people who completely delete the prior e-mail that they’re replying to, and just send their own thoughts or answers, with no ability to link it to the original e-mail.
With G-mail “threading”, this isn’t quite as big of an issue for some of my listserv e-mail, but in other cases, it’s completely absurd.
Of course, e-mail “threading” is somewhat absurd, too, the way that Google implements it, but that’s a completely different topic.
John, when I was a kid, back in the early Cenezoic Era, before the Internet, we had this widget called a “memory” to help with keeping track of what was in the previous communications. Sort of like one of those memo pad apps on a smartphone, except it updated itself automatically all the time, except (oddly enough) late at night.
The “iRemember” app wasn’t super reliable, unfortunately, and installing it left you vulnerable to the deeply destructive HeSaidSheSaid virus, but on the other hand it was cheap and used very little disk space, plus it was so simple to operate even n00bs could learn how to use it in a few minutes.
Meh. My iRemember app got corrupted a long time ag
What was the subject again?
There goes Carl pushing those newfangled notions of his. Get offa my lawn!
I don’t have a problem remembering things.
However, on a list-serv, when multiple people can be replying to a particular e-mail thread within minutes (or hours) of each other, and someone sends a response along the lines of, “I disagree with that point,” without quoting the original author, the iRemember app does no good whatsoever.
For e-mails back and forth between two people, as I said, it’s not much of an issue. For list-serv e-mails, leaving the original e-mail (or even part of it) that one is replying to is somewhat crucial.
Hah, all of this will seem so quaint when our brains are networked directly together with wireless devices injected into our bloodstream.
Dang, I need to come up with an email manifesto, too…Death to Emailarians!!!