IF you send and receive emails on an industrial scale, you're bound to trample over the rules of etiquette from time to time.
How do you address someone you've never met? What's the best way to sign off? What sort of tone should you adopt in the email? Jocular? Sober? Somewhere between the two? I start the occasional email with 'Dear Mr ----' but it feels like something from the pages of Jane Eyre.
Fortunately for those of us who are accustomed to breaching the rules every day, etiquette expert William Hanson has been offering some tips. He believes we have become so complacent with this communication medium that we have become somewhat lax.
You can tell where he's coming from when he says: "We are in an age where being liked is preferable to being correct. The lack of deference is alarming and nowhere is this more obvious on a daily basis than in our emails." I suppose he's right, though you could make a case for saying that this lack of deference has been much more corrosive in other fields - think about the decline in our collective respect for the monarchy, doctors, judges and politicians. But I digress.
Mr Hanson says the subject line should avoid vagueness and should summarise the contents of the email while avoiding using more than five or six words. The salutation, meantime, should err on the conservative side. Don't use 'Hey', he cautions: that is what horses eat. You are, moreover, you are not a 14-year-old American girl.
When signing off your email, do not use 'Best', which smacks of 'I really can't be bothered'. Use, instead, something better: 'With every best wish' and 'All good wishes'. And while he doesn't explore the issue of the tone of the actual email content, I can imagine that he'd favour the conservative over the recklessly jaunty.
There is a lot of good sense in what Mr Hanson writes, to the extent that I am tempted to email him along the following lines:
From: Russell Leadbetter
To: William Hanson
Subject: That thing you wrote the other day. You know, about emails and that sort of stuff.
Message: Hey Will! Loved yr piece on email etiquette, babes! It was fantastic! I too get fed up with receiving emails from perfect strangers that take an upbeat tone, straight off the bat. It just puts me off, u know? I mean, who are these people? What's wrong with them?
Anyway, congrats on brill piece. It needed saying!
Keep in touch!
Best, Russ x
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