PENGUIN WRITERS’ GUIDES

How to Write E ective Emails

R. L. Trask was born in western New York State in 1944. Having

come to England in 1970, he obtained his Ph.D. from the University
of London in 1983. He taught linguistics at the University of
Liverpool from 1979 to 1988, and then at the School of Cognitive
and Computing Science (now the Linguistics and English Language
Department) at the University of Sussex. His special interests were
historical linguistics, grammar and the Basque language. He wrote a
number of books, including A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in
Linguistics, Language Change, Language: The Basics, The Penguin Guide
to Punctuation, The Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar and Mind
the Ga e. How to Write E ective Emails is sadly his last book for
Penguin as he died in 2004.
The Penguin Writers’ Guides

How to Punctuate George Davidson

How to Write Better English Robert Allen
How to Write E ective Emails R. L. Trask
Improve Your Spelling George Davidson
Writing for Business Chris Shevlin
PENGUIN WRITERS’ GUIDES

How to Write E ective Emails

R. L. TRASK

PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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www.penguin.com

First published 2005

2

Copyright © R. L. Trask, 2005

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193669-7
For my wonderful Jan
 Contents

Acknowledgements

1 What This Book Is For

2 Getting Started with Email
3 Starting a Message
4 Presentation and Organization
5 Making It Look Nice
6 Attachments
7 Asking Questions
8 Replying and Forwarding
9 Posting to Mailing Lists and Newsgroups
10 Con dentiality and Legal Requirements

Glossary
Index
 Acknowledgements

For advice on various points, I am indebted to Marion Brooker, Nick

Brooker, Richard Coates, Emily Ellerton, Jan Lock, Lynne Murphy,
Geo rey Sampson, Patrick Warren and Max Wheeler.
While writing this book, I consulted dozens of web pages o ering
advice on email. The ones which I found particularly helpful were
those constructed by Jim Britell
(http://www.britell.com/use/use19.html), Sally Hambridge
(http://www.dtcc.edu/cs/rfc1855.html) and Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
(http://www.webfoot.com/advice/emailtop.html). All were
consulted in January 2003.
Any shortcomings are my own responsibility.
 1
What This Book Is For

1.1 WHY THIS BOOK?

More and more of us are spending more and more time sending and
receiving emails. If you’re looking at this book, then you are
probably already deep into the world of electronic mail. Some of
your emails are probably informal chit-chat with close friends or
with fellow hobbyists, but others are di erent. Sometimes you send
an email to somebody you don’t know at all, looking for advice or
assistance. And sometimes you send emails to business colleagues,
with the intention of getting some work done. And that’s what this
book is for.
When you mail a friend or a fellow enthusiast, you can use your
own judgement as to what style is best, and you may choose a
casual and chatty style, perhaps even a jokey one. But, when you
approach a stranger or a business associate, things are utterly
di erent. Now, a casual and chatty style is dead wrong, and a very
di erent style is called for.
The purpose of this book is to help you to write e ective emails
when you deal with strangers and business colleagues. When you
are looking for advice or assistance, or when you are conducting
any kind of serious business electronically, you want to make the
best possible impression on the people you are mailing. You want
them to see that you are mature, businesslike and professional, and
you want them to conclude that your mail should be taken
seriously. You do not want to give them the impression that you are
dopey, irresponsible or immature, that you are merely a child
fooling around with a new toy.
Writing e ective emails is not a trivial task. Just like learning
anything worthwhile, learning to write good emails takes time,
attention and e ort. You need to pay attention to what you are
doing, to think about whether you are doing the right thing, and to
put a good deal of e ort into what you write.
Email has been around long enough now that a body of
conventions has grown up concerning what is courteous and proper.
These conventions are commonly known as Netiquette, a cute
neologism for ‘etiquette on the Internet’. If you want your emails to
be taken seriously, then it is vital that you respect the conventions
of Netiquette. And teaching you those conventions is the purpose of
this book.
Judging by the large number of truly awful emails I receive every
week, I conclude that there are a lot of people out there who have
not yet understood the importance of learning to write emails
properly. Astonishingly, there are even a few professionals who
have not understood this.
Now and again, I have encountered a professional giving out this
advice: ‘Write emails in the manner you use in speaking casually,
since it is rude to compose them with the formal conventions of
other types of writing.’ This is terrible advice, and I can only
conclude that the people who give it must receive all their email
from another planet.
Perhaps once or twice a year I receive an email which is
uncomfortably sti and formal – but that’s only because the writer’s
sti and stu y personality is spilling over into his writing. But I get
hundreds and hundreds of emails which are far too casual to be
e ective, and not just casual, but careless, sloppy, childish – and
rude.
It is very hard to be rude by being formal and careful in your
writing. But it is extremely easy to give o ence if you fail to take
su cient care with your writing. I can demonstrate this by pointing
to my email inbox on any day of the year. Later in this book, I will
be showing you lots of examples of terrible emails.
Anyway, email is a form of writing, and it su ers from the same
problems as all other forms of writing. When we talk, we
communicate in all sorts of ways besides the words we are using.
We use intonation, tempo, volume, pitch and stress – in other
words, tone of voice – and we further use postures, gestures and
expressions. All these things contribute substantially to the
meanings we convey, and they help us to avoid obscurity and
misunderstanding. Moreover, if obscurity or misunderstanding does
occur in speech, we usually notice it at once, and we take steps to
x things.
None of this is true of writing. All of these valuable clues are lost
in writing, and there is no possibility of spotting or repairing any
misunderstandings. This is just as true of emails as it is of any other
kind of writing. Accordingly, if we fail to write our emails with
great care, we risk all kinds of misunderstanding and confusion.
Writing on a computer screen instead of a sheet of paper does
nothing to make these problems go away. And pretending that email
is just an electronic version of conversation is a terrible mistake.

1.2 INFORMALITY
It is commonly said that email is an ‘informal’ medium. This
statement is true, up to a point, but it is often badly misunderstood.
When I compose an email, I don’t write it in the kind of formal
English I would use in writing a learned article for a scholarly
journal. For example, I use the pronouns I and you freely in my
emails, but I don’t use them in my formal writing. My emails
sometimes contain incomplete sentences like Not so, but these never
occur in my formal writing. In an email, I might nd occasion to
mention my wife or my friends, or to relate an anecdote about
something that happened to me once, or to say something about
recent political events. I wouldn’t do any of these things in my
scholarly writing.
To this extent, then, email is ‘informal’. The style which is
appropriate for emails is not the style appropriate for the most
formal kinds of writing.
 But ‘informal’ does not mean ‘casual’. It does not mean ‘hasty’. It
does not mean ‘sloppy’. It does not mean ‘cutesy and jokey’. It does
not mean ‘departing from standard English’. It does not mean
‘ignoring common courtesy’. It does not mean ‘resembling the
personal letters of an eleven-year-old schoolgirl’. When I say that
emails are ‘informal’, I most certainly do not mean that they should
be thrown together in moments and then red o without being
edited or even proofread.
Sadly, the constant advice from some quarters to keep emails
‘informal’ has very often had the unintended e ect of producing all
of these dreadful outcomes. I know, because precisely those dreadful
outcomes arrive in my inbox every day of the week.
Just to cite one example, many people commit the terrible
blunder of failing to sign their emails. I get a dozen or two unsigned
emails every week. Recently I asked the woman who had sent me
one of them why she had failed to sign her name. She replied that
she had been advised that email was an ‘informal’ medium, and she
was afraid that signing her mail would be unacceptably ‘formal’.
Well, I can’t blame her for the misunderstanding, but I can
certainly blame the people who were advising her to keep her mail
‘informal’. There is no context I know of in which anonymous
messages are regarded as courteous or proper, or even as
acceptable, and email is no exception. Being informal does not mean
tossing common courtesy out the window. Anonymous messages are
not ‘informal’: they are childish and o ensive, even when they are
carried by electrons. We will discuss this point further in chapter 2.
Some business rms instruct their employees that business emails
should be prepared with the same care as business letters. You
probably don’t need to devote that level of attention to your emails,
but, when in doubt, you should always err on the side of caution.
More time, care and attention is better than less, and more editing
and proofreading is better than less.

1.3 WHAT THIS BOOK DOES NOT COVER

First, this book does not attempt to deal with technical questions. If
you have a technical question about your email, you should consult
your manual, look at your online Help les, or talk to your technical
support sta . There are also quite a few books which deal with the
technical side of email, though some of these are advanced works
aimed at technically sophisticated readers.
I will be assuming that you have a mailer program up and
running, and that you have enough technical knowledge to send
emails. (If this puzzles you, see the beginning of chapter 2.) I will
also be assuming that you have a few basic computing skills, such as
the ability to perform cut-and-paste operations (moving or copying
text from one place to another).
Second, I am not trying to give you advice about very informal
emails sent to close friends, colleagues and fellow enthusiasts.
Emails sent in these circumstances are typically much more relaxed
than emails written to strangers. They may contain all sorts of jokes,
slang expressions and cute little doodahs; they may consist of
incomplete sentences, and they often receive little or no
proofreading and editing. Here is an example:
Caught the latest Spielberg ick last nite. Wow and *Wow* and >>**WOW!!!**<<
Havent had my head feasted like that since our old pal Luke shot down his last
imperail baddy. The special fx are just TREMENJOUS!!! :^0 :^0
––Ν

Depending on your tastes, you may or may not consider this a

suitable way of mailing a close friend. But I will leave that decision
to you. This book deals only with emails to strangers, and with
business emails in general.

1.4 THE WORST MISTAKE YOU CAN MAKE

In comparison with most other kinds of writing, emails are typically
hasty. But, when you are writing a serious email to a stranger, you
must resist the temptation to do it hastily.
 Many people, when they are composing an email, think to
themselves, ‘If I can save myself a little time and e ort here, that’ll
be a good idea.’ It is not a good idea: in fact, it is a terrible idea.
When you are writing a serious email, absolutely the last thing you
should be trying to do is to save yourself a little time.
What you should be trying to do instead is to make life easy for the
people you are mailing. After all, you are the one who is approaching
somebody else for assistance. Therefore it is your responsibility to
do everything you can to ensure that giving you that assistance is as
easy as it can be for the other people.
And saving your own time won’t achieve this. You can save your
own time by making your message so hasty and so badly written
that your recipients can hardly understand what you’re talking
about. This forces them to do a good deal of unnecessary work just
in order to gure out what it is you want. In other words, saving
your own time is irresponsible, childish and o ensive. On top of all
this, it is ine ective: many recipients simply won’t bother to
respond at all to a badly written message. Or – as we will see later
in this book – recipients may be genuinely unable to understand
what you’re talking about.
If you have obviously spent no more than twenty seconds in
composing your message, do you really think that the person at the
other end is going to spend ten or fteen minutes writing a careful
reply? If you think that, then you have a serious problem with
reality.
The single most important thing to understand about writing
successful emails is this: good emails take time and e ort to write. A
good email simply cannot be thrown together hastily and then red
o . Unless you have a Mozart-like gift for getting everything perfect
at the rst attempt – and, let’s face it: you don’t – you must be
prepared to spend some time in thinking about your message, in
writing it, in editing and polishing it, and nally in proofreading it,
before you let it go.
1.5 SOME THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND
No matter how you send your email, you are using somebody else’s
equipment. Possibly you are sending your mail from a computer
which belongs to your employer, or to your university, or to an
Internet café. Even if you own your computer, you are surely paying
someone to connect you to the Internet, which means that you are
using their equipment. And, in any case, your messages will be
travelling along wires that belong to somebody else, and via a series
of other people’s computers, before they reach their destinations.
Consequently, a lot of other people have a stake in your mail
messages, and these people have a right to demand that you use
their equipment in a manner which is legal, responsible and
honourable. If you fail to meet these not-very-demanding
conditions, you will probably nd that those other people are no
longer willing to allow you to use their equipment, and you may
nd yourself banned from sending any emails at all.
Note in particular that you may not send personal emails from
your computer at work without the permission of your employer.
Ignoring this very reasonable requirement may cost you your job,
especially if you send a personal email which o ends somebody.
Email is cheaper than paper mail, or ‘snail mail’, as it is often
known, but it is not free. Somebody has to pay for every mail that is
sent. As a rule of thumb, the cost of an email is divided about
equally between the sender and the receiver. If you are not the one
who signs the cheques for your email, remember that somebody else
is coughing up the money to keep you in business, and try not to
spend that money foolishly. And, of course, bear in mind that your
mails are costing your recipients money. This is one reason why
electronic junk mail is so infuriating.
Remember that your recipient is a human being whose language,
culture and humour may be very di erent from yours. Be very
careful with slang expressions, with idioms, with jokes, and with
appeals to the details of your culture. What is currently trendy in
your circle may be utterly incomprehensible to readers elsewhere,
especially among those whose rst language is not English, but not
only there.
For example, we in Britain have recently been reading about a
popular television presenter who was caught with a prostitute, and
this revelation has led to a urry of jokes about that presenter and
prostitutes. Many of us nd these jokes very funny, but they will be
meaningless to anyone outside Britain who hasn’t heard about the
story, and they may be highly o ensive to readers in some societies
where prostitution is not considered a t subject for jokes.
Above all, be very careful with sarcasm. Sarcastic remarks can
easily be badly misunderstood, and they may produce unintended
but nevertheless great o ence.
Among less emotive topics, observe that measurements do not
travel well. You may be comfortable with square miles and degrees
Fahrenheit, but these units will be so much Greek to many of your
readers, who are only used to square kilometres and degrees Celsius.
And date formats can also be a problem. To an American, 11/6
means November 6th, while, to most of the rest of the world, it
means 11 June.
In all cases, it is your responsibility to see to it that your recipients
are not confused, bewildered or o ended by your email messages.
There is another point. I can hardly believe I need to mention
this, but colleagues assure me that there are people out there who
don’t seem to understand it. Remember that the earth is divided into
twenty-four time zones, and that local time varies greatly from one
place to another. So, if you are wondering why you haven’t yet had
a reply to the obviously fascinating and brilliant email you sent
some ago, it may be that the reason is merely that it is the middle of
the night where your recipient lives, and he is sound asleep.
Finally, bear this fact in mind: once you click on the Send button
on your mailer, your email is gone. All the king’s horses and all the
king’s men can’t bring it back again, and neither can all the
computer technicians in the world. If you’ve made a mistake, then
you are doomed: all of your recipients will shortly be reading your
blundering words. And almost every one of us has had the grim
experience of clicking on that button and then realizing, moments
later, ‘Oh, no! I made a big mistake!’ You can keep these awful
moments to a minimum if you make a habit of checking and double-
checking and triple-checking your messages before you send them.
Sure, this takes time, but trying to clean up after your mistakes
takes time, too, and it’s a lot more unpleasant.
(An aside: one or two mailer programs contain a button called
‘Recall this message’. This is meant to give you the chance to pull
back a message about which you suddenly develop second thoughts.
But this button very seldom works, even if you click on it only ten
seconds later, and it never works after a minute or two. If your
mailer has this thing, just forget about it. Get your message right
before you send it.)

1.6 SOME NO-NOS OF EMAIL

There are a number of badly mistaken beliefs and attitudes which
are depressingly widespread among inexperienced users of email.
Here is a summary of some of the most familiar ones.

1. It’s a good idea to save time in writing emails.

2. I need a response right away.
3. Look how witty/clever/important I am.
4. I need to express my personality.
5. I’m going to give you a piece of my mind.
6. I’m not really dealing with a human being here.
7. Everybody’s familiar with my language and my culture.
8. Everybody enjoys my sense of humour.
9. Everybody uses the same computer and the same software that I
use.
10. Everybody remembers every word of my emails.
11. Everybody is healthy and has perfect eyesight.
12. Email doesn’t cost anything.
13. Email is con dential.
14. Email is not subject to the laws covering other communications.

I’ve already touched upon a couple of these blunders. In the rest of

the book, we’ll be looking at almost all of them in some detail.

1.7 A REMINDER
Read this passage and remember it, always, when you are mailing
strangers.
The people you are mailing are busy. They have jobs and lives to
look after, and they don’t have much time for dealing with emails
from strangers. They are courteous, and they will try to be helpful,
but only if your behaviour demonstrates that you deserve a helpful
response.
Nobody is going to devote more time and trouble to a reply than
you have devoted to writing your email in the rst place. If your
message is hasty and sloppy, and has obviously been dashed o in
only a few seconds, then nobody is going to spend more than a few
seconds in constructing a reply – and very many people won’t
bother to reply at all.
If you want your recipients to devote some time and e ort to
replying to your message, then you must show them you deserve
this by devoting time and e ort to your own message.
You must write your message as clearly, as carefully and as
explicitly as you can. You must write it in the very best standard
English you can muster, and you must edit it and polish it until you
can’t see any more shortcomings. You must learn the courtesies and
conventions of email – which are not very di erent from the
courtesies and conventions of other kinds of writing.
Email is no excuse for haste, sloppiness, rudeness or any kind of
childish or irresponsible behaviour. And email is no place to display
your personality or your eccentric beliefs.
 Finally, an email is a document, and it must not be treated lightly
merely because it’s not inscribed on a piece of paper. A promise
made by email is still a promise. And an o ensive remark in an
email is still o ensive.

Chapter summary:

• A business email must be composed in a businesslike manner

 2
Getting Started with Email

2.1 WHAT YOU NEED

If you already have your email up and running, you can probably
skip this section. But, if you haven’t sent an email yet, you need to
know a few things.
The rst thing you need, of course, is a computer. But a computer
won’t send or receive email until it’s equipped with a few
accessories.
The most urgent requirement is a mailer program, or mailer for
short. A mailer is a piece of software which is designed to allow the
sending and receiving of electronic mail. There are many mailers on
the market, and new ones appear with some regularity, as do
updated versions of older mailers.
If you are using a computer which you don’t own – at work, at
your university, or in an Internet café – then the machine will be
equipped with a mailer selected by somebody else, and you won’t
have much choice in the matter. Your home computer doubtless
arrived with a mailer program already included, or ‘bundled’, in the
jargon. But be aware that you don’t have to use that mailer. If you
nd you don’t like it, you can go out and buy another mailer and
install that on your computer. You can even have two or three
mailers sitting on your machine, and choose among them according
to your mood. Providing you are using only one email address, each
mailer will allow you to read all your mail.
There are certain features which are provided by almost every
mailer on the market. We will be talking about some of these
features at suitable places in the book. But here’s a small warning:
when I tell you that practically every mailer in existence has a
certain feature, it is just possible that your mailer lacks that feature.
I’ll try to draw attention to this possibility whenever I can, but I
have not used every mailer on the market, and even I may
sometimes be surprised by the shortcomings of particular mailers. If
you discover that your mailer lacks a useful feature which
practically all mailers have, this might be a good reason to buy a
new mailer.
But the mailer still won’t do anything until you are connected to
the Internet. Your work machine will have that connection already
provided. On your home computer, however, you will have to
arrange the connection yourself – and doing this will cost money.
For this purpose you need to sign an agreement with a business rm
which provides Internet connections. Such a rm is an Internet
service provider, or ISP.
There exist many ISPs. Some of them are giant multinational
businesses, while others are small local rms, but they all provide
much the same service. Quite possibly your home computer arrived
with an o er from an ISP to provide you with service. If you like,
you can simply accept the o er by following the instructions
provided. But you don’t have to do this. There will be other ISPs
operating in your area, and you might be wise to talk to some of
your more experienced friends about their experience of prices and
quality of service.
(Note that an ISP does not merely provide email. It provides a full
suite of Internet services, including the ability to search the World
Wide Web for information and to read pages that you nd
interesting, the ability to make your own web pages available to the
world, and many other things.)
The next thing you need is an email address. This is the address
which everybody else must use when sending you mail. Your
address is unique to you: it distinguishes you from every other
person on the Internet. The second part of your address is
determined by your provider, but you have some freedom in
choosing the rst part, your username. See the next section for
advice on making this choice.
 There remains one more thing: a physical connection to the wires
through which Internet links run, allowing you to go on line. There
are two ways of arranging this.
One way is to use a modem, a device which allows you to make
the connection through an ordinary telephone line. These days,
almost every computer comes with a modem built in, and all you
have to do is to buy a suitably long modem cable from your local
computer shop, plug one end into the place provided on your
computer, and plug the other end into a phone jack on the wall
(after unplugging the phone that was there). This will give you the
required connection, but note that your phones will not work while
your computer is on line, unless you have a second phone line put in
just to service your computer.
The other way is to have a permanent wire built in to your house
or other establishment. This is the normal procedure with computers
in business and at universities. It was not formerly usual for home
computers, but it is now becoming more frequent, thanks to the
growing availability of broadband connections in private houses. A
broadband connection o ers much faster service for all Internet
purposes than do modems and traditional wires. Broadband services
are typically o ered by television cable companies and telephone
companies, but at present they are not available everywhere, and
you will have to check to see if they are available in your area.
This is all you need to send and receive email. But, in order to
gain full bene t from your connection to the Internet, you will need
a browser, a program which allows you to read web pages. Your
home computer has undoubtedly come equipped with a browser
built in; popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Internet
Explorer, but others exist, and you can always buy a new one (or
perhaps download one for free from the Web). Another tool you will
need is a search engine, a piece of software which allows you to
search the World Wide Web for pages on particular topics. There are
a number of search engines; among the popular ones are Google,
Yahoo!, AltaVista and Ask Jeeves. Your browser probably makes one
or more of these readily available; in any case, they are free.
 These programs are enormously valuable, but they are irrelevant
to email, except in one circumstance: you can use a browser in order
to send and receive mail on a newsgroup, as explained in section
9.10.

2.2 CHOOSING A USERNAME

Your email address consists of two parts. The part after the at-sign
(@) is the domain name, the name of the email system to which
you are subscribed, and this is the same for everybody on that
system. For your computer at home, this is the name of your
Internet service provider, the company which connects you to the
Internet and to which you are probably paying a monthly fee. The
part before the at-sign is your username, the part that distinguishes
you from every other person on that system.
Now, your provider will allow you some freedom in choosing
your username, but there are limits imposed by every ISP, and you
will not be o ered a completely free choice. Ideally, your username
should be as similar as possible to your name. Suppose your name is
Katie Garner. Then you would probably like to have an address that
looks something like this:
[email protected]

This looks professional and serious. And it has clear advantages.

Look at your inbox, or mail spool, the list of emails you have
received and not yet deleted. You will see that the sender of each
email is identi ed in some way, probably by username. And having
your emails agged Katie.Garner is desirable. That way, your friends
will recognize your messages instantly, while the strangers you have
mailed will realize at once that you are probably a real person
sending a real message, and not just one more infuriating purveyor
of junk mail.
Some providers will make you settle for something like this:
 [email protected]

This format is not nearly as good as the rst one, but it’s just about
acceptable, since your name is still visible, if now much less
prominent. But some providers will lumber you with an algebraic
username like this:
kmg18 [email protected]

And this is not acceptable. Now your identity is buried in a crowd of

cryptic characters, and your name is not visible at all. This is bad,
for several reasons. One reason is this. Like everybody who is
electronically active, I get loads of electronic junk mail, or spam, as
it is commonly called. And very many of those junk mails arrive
agged with algebraic usernames of exactly this kind. Now, like
every experienced user of email, I skip through my mail in the
morning, deleting all the junk mails without bothering to open
them. If your emails arrive looking like this, there is a grave danger
that they will be mistaken for junk and instantly deleted – especially
if you have failed to provide a good subject line, as explained in the
next chapter.
Moreover, usernames consisting of strings of meaningless
characters are hard to remember and hard to type accurately. Katie’s
friends will have little trouble remembering Katie.Garner or typing
it correctly, but something like kmg18 73 will be a chore for them
to recall and a headache to type correctly.
So, if your provider insists on lumbering you with a dreadful
username like this, I suggest you look for another provider, one
which is more obliging.
Note that it is essential to include your surname in your
username. Suppose you don’t, and opt for something like this:
[email protected]
Now the consequence will be that, for many of your recipients, your
emails will wind up agged like this:
Katie

Why is this bad? First, it is childish to use your rst name alone, as
we will see further in the section on signatures. Second, I get lots
and lots of emails from people who sign themselves just ‘Katie’ or
‘Samantha’ or the like, and all of them are junk. These are the
people who are trying to sell me mortgages, or Viagra, or
investment opportunities, or pornography. Naturally, when I see a
message from Katie or Samantha, I delete it instantly. Do you want
your emails to be deleted instantly?
Some people use their surnames alone as usernames. But this can
be a little misleading if your surname happens to be ‘Dennis’ or
‘Malcolm’, since such names can easily be taken as rst names.
Finally, you must resist the temptation to choose a cutesy
username like RadRapper or hot oozie or elfmaiden. Usernames like
these are typically chosen by fourteen-year-olds, and they are ne if
you never expect to mail anybody but close friends. But the rest of
the world, on seeing a username like this, will very likely conclude
that you still have a lot of growing up to do, and that you are not a
person to be taken seriously. Can you really imagine mailing a bank
about a possible job and signing yourself hot oozie? If you already
have one of these things, it’s time to get rid of it and choose
something more professional-looking.

2.3 TYPEFACES AND LINE LENGTH

Your mailer doubtless comes equipped with a default typeface. This
will be a plain font, in black, probably twelve-point. Unless you
discover a problem with your default setting, you should leave it
alone.
You should not try to fool around with fancy fonts. If you change
your mailer’s setting to some cutesy font, or if you change its colour
to red or green or purple, then I’ve got news for you: out of every
hundred people who receive your emails, one hundred people will
be annoyed or disgusted, and zero people will be impressed. And
readers who are colour-blind may be unable to read your mail at all.
Oh, and don’t change the background colour. Anybody who receives
an email in white lettering on a uorescent purple background is
going to close his eyes and delete the awful mess at once.
Even worse is changing the size of your type. The standard
twelve-point type is just about big enough to be readable by a
recipient with average eyesight. If you change to a smaller typeface,
then there is a great danger that many recipients will be unable to
read your messages. Even eleven-point type, the default selected by
a few mailers, is uncomfortably small for many people. Not
everybody has perfect eyesight, and some people su er from very
poor eyesight, but they still need to use email. You should not use a
typeface smaller than twelve-point.
I get mail fairly regularly from two or three people who seem to
have set their mailers to use what looks like eight-point type. Their
messages are completely unreadable on my screen. If I badly want
to read their mails, I have to engage in some tedious and time-
consuming manipulation in order to convert their texts into
something that I can read. You will not be surprised to hear that I
seldom want to read their contributions that badly. Unreadable
messages are an excellent reason for reaching for the Delete button.
Remember one of the no-nos from chapter 1: email is no place to
express your personality. If your personality requires fancy purple
letters, save them for your bedroom wall. Stick to businesslike fonts
for business purposes.
It is wise to check the line length used by your mailer. This is easy
to do. Just start writing an email (which you are not going to send),
and type until the text wraps – that is, until the text starts a new
line. Then count the characters on one complete line, including the
spaces. The total should not be greater than seventy, and some
experienced commentators recommend a maximum of sixty- ve
characters.
 If your lines are too long, then I’m afraid you must consult your
manual, or your on-line Help function, and nd out how to shorten
the lines (you will probably nd your line length given under
preferences). Otherwise, your emails are going to look like this on
many people’s screens:
The American cereal maize, or sweet corn, reached the Basque
Country in the 16th century. It proved to be better adapted
to Basque conditions than the traditional wheat and millet – both
more productive and more reliable. Within a century maize had become
the staple crop, and the periodic famines which had once forced
the people to eat acorns were a thing of the past.

This kind of thing is annoyingly hard to read, and no one will thank
you for lling his screen with it. (But I am told that some mailers
don’t allow you to alter the line length. If yours doesn’t, and you
nd yourself stuck with an awkward length, this is an excellent
excuse for buying a new mailer.)

2.4 SIGNATURE
Would you write a business letter and send it o without putting
your name at the end? I hope not. But very many people commit
this very blunder with every email they send: they fail to sign their
messages.
Failure to sign your emails is thoughtless, rude and just plain
dumb. Sending unsigned messages is one of the quickest ways of
convincing your recipients that you are a backward child. True,
your username may contain your name, but then again it may not.
In any case, ordinary etiquette on the Net, just as anywhere else,
requires a signature at the end of a message.
You may prefer to use a formal version of your name:
Katherine M. Garner
Or you may prefer an everyday version:
Katie Garner

Or, if you don’t mind concealing your sex, you may even prefer to
use your initials:
Κ. M. Garner

All of these are ne, and the choice among them is purely a matter
of taste. But note that initials are used far more often by men than
by women, and as a result many readers will instantly assume that
‘K. M. Garner’ is a man.
But note carefully: you must sign your full name, including your
surname. It is completely unacceptable to sign yourself with your
rst name alone:
Katie

Small children identify themselves by their rst names only, but

grown-ups do not. When you are mailing people you don’t know,
signing with your rst name alone is childish. Don’t do it. Use your
full name.
There is a further problem if you are commonly known as ‘Pat’ or
as ‘Sandy’. Names like these can be conferred upon both sexes, and
so, if you sign yourself Pat Richards or Sandy McCarver, recipients
will be unable to guess your sex, and some of them may jump to the
wrong conclusion. If you think you might nd this embarrassing,
then you should consider a more formal version, such as ‘Patrick’ or
‘Patricia’, or ‘Alexander’ or ‘Sandra’. Signing yourself Christine
(Chris) Woods is awkward but e ective: now everybody can see that
you are a woman named ‘Christine’ who prefers to be known as
‘Chris’.
You don’t have to type out your name every time you send mail.
Somewhere in your mailer program, probably in the section labelled
preferences, is an option called signature, or perhaps.sig. If you
haven’t already discovered the signature option, look for it now.
The signature option allows you to type in the signature of your
choice. Once you have done this, your chosen signature will
automatically be attached to the end of every email you send. As
you are typing your message, you can usually see your signature, so
you know it is there. And, of course, you can edit that signature, if
you want to. If you are mailing a close friend, you might prefer to
delete your ordinary signature and to replace it with something
more informal. (I’m told that a few mailers fail to display your
signature. If you have one of these, this is a good excuse to buy a
new mailer.)
Even better, some mailers allow you to compose two signatures –
say, a formal one and an informal one – and to choose which one
you want every time you write an email. And a few mailers will
compose and insert your signature automatically, with no action
from you, though I can’t guarantee that you will be pleased by the
result.
There is one more important advantage to using a signature, quite
apart from ordinary courtesy. The technology of email is not
infallible, and occasionally an email message arrives at its
destination with its last part missing. Now, if your recipient can see
your signature at the end of your mail, then he knows that the
entire message has arrived safely. But, if all he sees is some lines of
text followed abruptly by a blank space, then he has no way of
being sure that he has received the whole message. As always, it is
your job to make life easy for the people you are mailing.
While you’re in the signature option, it’s an excellent idea to add
your email address after your name. This practice is universally
considered to be courteous and professional. Moreover, as we will
see later in the book, some mailers have the bad habit of stripping
from the beginning of an email all information about the source of
that mail. Therefore, your signature, with your email address, might
provide the only way for readers to know who you are and how to
mail you. So, your full signature might look like this:
 Katherine M. Garner
[email protected]

For your private email at home, this is probably all you need. You
don’t want to publish your home address and home phone number,
since the people who will be interested in this information will
include your local burglars.
However, for your work email, you need to include a lot more. At
work, you should include in your signature your name and your
position and all of your contact details: the name of your employer,
the employer’s postal address (including the country: don’t forget
that), your email address, your phone number (in both domestic and
international versions, if you do any business outside your country),
your fax number (ditto), your mobile phone number (if you use that
phone for business) and any other information that might help
colleagues or customers to reach you. It is also good practice to
include the URL (web address) of your web page or of your
company’s web page. So, at work, our friend Katie’s email signature
might look like this:
Katherine M. Garner
Commissioning Editor
Hobsbaum Publishers
22–24 Old London Road
Brighton
East Sussex BN1 7RR
UK

[email protected]

Tel: 01273–929292 (from UK); +44–1273–929292 (from abroad)

Fax: 01273–926457 (from UK); +44–1273–926457 (from abroad)
Mobile: 07799–834854

URL: http://www.hobsbaum.co.uk/html

This is what professionals do, and you should follow suit.

 Some people like to decorate their private signatures with doodles
or humorous quotations or pithy sayings. This is harmless enough,
but I don’t particularly recommend it. Doing this adds unnecessary
length to every email you send, and unnecessary length is not an
appealing property in an email. Moreover, if you mail the same
people frequently, they will get tired of seeing your jokes or
homilies over and over and over again. Anyway, your recipients
have to pay for their email, and, the longer your message, the more
they have to pay to receive it. (The dozen or so lines of Katie’s
business signature above are a di erent case: this information is
valuable, and it is worth the space it occupies.)
It is also a bad idea to decorate your signature with a line of
hyphens, or in fact a line of anything. You may think it looks nice,
but there are blind or nearly blind people who have their email read
aloud to them by their computers. Imagine the joy of sitting there
while your machine intones ‘hyphen, hyphen, hyphen, hyphen,
hyphen, hyphen…’ (My thanks to Kaitlin Duck Sherwood for
pointing out this problem.)
And, of course, you absolutely must not include in your signature
any expression of your political or religious beliefs. Such additions
are o ensive in the extreme, and they will get you banned from
many electronic services. If you try this with your work email, you
may nd yourself in very serious trouble indeed. Save your political
and religious beliefs for the contexts in which it is appropriate to
express them.

2.5 SHARED ADDRESSES

Sometimes a couple share a single email address on their home
computer. This arrangement saves a little money, but it can bring
problems.
If the two people sharing the address are careless about signing
their mail, then recipients may be genuinely confused about who is
mailing them. Worse, a mail sent to one of the couple may be read
by the other, and this can prove awkward. Even the most devoted
couples like to keep a few secrets from each other. If Susie is
arranging a surprise party for Mike’s birthday, her plans will be
spoiled if Mike happens to read an email meant for her.
Unless money is distressingly tight, you and your partner will
probably be a lot more comfortable if you have your own individual
addresses.

Chapter summary:

• Choose a professional-looking username

• Write in twelve-point black type on a white background
• Sign your emails with your full name
 3
Starting a Message

3.1 DECIDING WHO TO MAIL

The heading of this section may look strange at rst glance. Why
would I want to o er you advice on who to mail? Surely you
already know who you want to mail.
When you are sitting in front of your computer at home, this
decision may indeed be easy. But things become much more
complicated when you are at work or at university. The reason they
become complicated is the existence of aliases.
An alias is a generic address for a group of people within an
institution. An email sent to an alias will be sent to every person in
the group covered by that alias. Consider my university, within
which we have a large number of aliases. There is one alias for the
academic sta in each department, another for all academic sta ,
another for administrative sta , another for technical support sta ,
another for the building maintenance sta , another for all sta ,
many more for picking out various groups of students, and so on. In
addition, there are aliases which deal with particular functions
rather than with groups of people, such as the one for social
messages and the one for jokes; membership of these is voluntary.
Every institution containing a number of people has a comparable
set of aliases. For example, a large publishing house might have
aliases such as ction, childrens, language and science for its
various editorial divisions, plus editorial, publicity and nance for
di erent groups of its sta , and perhaps social for social events.
Aliases allow us to single out a particular group of people for an
email without the wearisome necessity of typing out every single
person’s address. However, when aliases are available, it is
important to choose an alias carefully.
 The basic rule is this: mail as few people as possible. If your
message is really only relevant to three people, then mail only those
three. Don’t send your message o to an alias which includes twenty
or fty or three hundred people. Clogging many people’s inboxes
with messages that they have no interest in is bad behaviour, and
engaging in such behaviour will earn you no friends at all.
This advice is doubly important when you are complaining. If you
have lost your swipe card, and your promised replacement is a week
late in arriving, then take it up with the building supervisor whose
responsibility it is. Don’t complain loudly to everybody in the
building. There is no need to embarrass the building supervisor in
front of everybody, and doing so will merely convince your
colleagues that you are an idiot. And, if it turns out that the
supervisor’s four-year-old daughter was rushed critically ill into
hospital three days ago, your status as a colossal oaf will be
abundantly con rmed.
Before you send an email to more than one person, think twice
about whether they all need to see your mail.
Finally, there are times when you might think carefully about
whether an email is a good idea at all. Email is more informal than
many types of writing, but it is also a little detached and impersonal
in comparison with direct contact. If you are passing on
congratulations or commiserations, perhaps face-to-face
conversation or even a phone call might be appreciated more than
an email.

3.2 OVERDOING IT
You should not send an email without a good reason. Some people
become so addicted to email that they can’t leave it alone, and they
sit at their desks for hours, ring o one email after another, more
to entertain themselves than to get anything useful done. If you nd
yourself su ering from this problem, you must get a grip on
yourself. Bombarding your colleagues or acquaintances with a
stream of inconsequential emails is scarcely better than sending
them junk mail. Your recipients will de nitely not appreciate having
their inboxes stu ed with endless messages from you, each one
relaying a trivial bit of news or a joke or a scrap of gossip or your
opinion of a new lm.
Overdoing it in this way is a good way to lose friends. Before
long, your emails will be welcome nowhere, and your more
technically expert colleagues may take steps to block emails with
your name attached. Then, of course, when you nally do have
something important to say, nobody will bother to read it.

3.3 ADDRESS LINE AND CC LINES

When you open a window to send an email message, there will be
several blank lines at the top of the window. The rst of these is the
address line.
The address line is the line into which you type the email
address of the person you are mailing. I’m sure you already knew
that, but I want to remind you here of the importance of checking
and double-checking that address after you have typed it in. It is
extremely easy to commit a typing error when you are typing in an
address. It is doubly easy to make a mistake if the address is
algebraic, containing a string of meaningless characters, or if it is
unusually long, with several portions separated by dots, hyphens or
twiddles. Suppose this is the address you are trying to type in:
[email protected]

And suppose what you actually type is this:

[email protected]

Is this right? No? Have you spotted the mistake? Feeling pretty
good? Well, in fact, there are two mistakes in the second version.
Did you catch both of them?
 You probably spotted munchen for muenchen pretty quickly. But
did you catch 1 (the numeral one) in place of the required (the
small letter L)? These two characters are infuriatingly similar in
appearance in many typefaces, and they get confused all the time.
Much the same happens with the capital letter O and the numeral
zero, which are likewise easily confused.
It is worth taking a few moments to check the address. Otherwise,
you may nd that your carefully crafted message bounces: that is, it
simply comes straight back to you with an error message along the
lines of ‘no such address’. At this point you will have to do the
proofreading which you neglected to do in the rst place. Moreover,
if you simply try to re-send the bounced mail to the right address,
you will probably nd that your mailer has decorated it with an
irritating string of angle brackets, as explained in chapter 8. On top
of this, your original subject line will have been erased and replaced
with something like Error: message undeliverable. So you’ll have to
re-type the subject line.
On the whole, you will enjoy a more relaxed morning if you
carefully proofread the address in the rst place.
Even simple and familiar addresses can readily be mistyped. I
mail my wife all the time, and I have her short and simple address
in my head. Even so, one of my mails to her bounced on one
occasion, because I had rattled o the familiar address and then
plunged ahead without checking it – but I had made a simple typing
error.
Addresses to which you frequently send mail can be stored in
your mailer’s address book, a facility which allows you to keep a
list of a large number of addresses. There will be some simple way
of choosing an address from the address book and of inserting it into
the address line of a new message with a mere click of your mouse,
with no typing required. If you haven’t already discovered how to
do this, take a look now.
It is possible to type two or more addresses onto the address line,
but you must be careful about how you do this. On most mailers,
the procedure is this: type in the rst address, followed immediately
by a comma, then a white space, and then the second address, and
so on. Here is an example:
[email protected], [email protected], anr27d [email protected]

Once you leave the address line, your mailer will convert these into
a neat list:
[email protected]
[email protected]
anr27d [email protected]

Below the address line is the cc line. This line provides the
facility for sending copies of your message to people who you are
not mailing directly. (The quaint abbreviation cc stands for ‘carbon
copy’; if you can remember carbon paper, you must be as old as I
am.) You can type in additional addresses here, and your message
will also be sent to those addresses.
Why the di erence between the address line and the cc line?
Well, the general idea is that the people on the cc line are simply
being kept informed of what is going on, and they are not expected
to do anything. Anybody from whom you are expecting a response
should therefore appear on the address line, and not on the cc line.
The third line is the bcc line. The letters here stand for ‘blind cc’.
People whose addresses you type in here will also receive your
message. However, while all your recipients will see all of the
addresses on your address line and on your cc line, the addresses on
the bcc line will be suppressed, and nobody will see them. The bcc
line therefore provides a way of copying your message secretly to
some recipients. In all my years of using email, I have never once
found occasion to use the bcc line, but maybe you can think of a use
for it.

3.4 SUBJECT LINES

When you send an email, there will be a line at the top of the
window, somewhere just below the address to which you are
sending your message, entitled subject The words you type onto this
line are the subject line for that message, and choosing a suitable
subject line is a skill which separates competent emailers from
ignorant bumblers.
When your message arrives in your recipient’s inbox, the subject
line you have provided will be displayed alongside your username.
Look at the messages in your inbox, and you will see the subject
lines chosen by the people who have mailed you.
Now, the rst point is this: you must supply a subject line for each
message. Leaving the subject line blank is appallingly ignorant and
thoughtless. It is the subject line which tells the recipients what
your message is about. If you don’t provide a subject line, the
recipients will have no clue what you are writing about, and they
will be forced to open your mail and read it in order to nd out
even whether they have any interest in it. And not everybody is
willing to do that. Some recipients will take this view: ‘If he can’t be
bothered to tell me what this message is about, then I can’t be
bothered to read it.’ And your message will be deleted without being
read.
Moreover, the subject line you settle on must be informative. It is a
waste of time to ll the subject line with useless words like Hi! or
Information or Question. Such choices still give the recipients no
clue as to what your message is about.
The problem of bad or absent subject lines becomes even worse
when these are combined with bad or silly usernames, as described
in the last chapter. Suppose that I come into work one morning and
nd the following new emails waiting for me in my inbox. Which
ones do you think I will open, and which ones do you think I will
simply delete at once? Bear in mind that, in real life, I typically get
two hundred new messages every day, and not just nine. (Assume
that I have recently sent a posting entitled No primitive languages to
an electronic mailing list.)
1. Margaret.Rice Where can I
buy your
new book?

2. Samantha hot farm

girls

3. Sylvia

4. j.w.noble Re: No
primitive
languages

5. Jason Hello!

6. prettywoman can you help

me

7. jgw24gg17h8 new
invesment
oppertunitys

8. MRS ABACHA URGENT

9. Stan.Friedman Request to
write a
chapter

Well, let’s see. Number 1 is obviously a serious question, so I’ll open

it. Number 2 is junk mail: delete. Number 3 manages to violate just
about every principle of good practice I have so far mentioned, and
it will be quickly deleted. Number 4 is plainly a reply to my posting,
so I’ll read it. Numbers 5 and 6 are two more instances of bad
behaviour, and they too will meet instant deletion. The illiterate
number 7 is junk mail, so out it goes. Number 8 is a junk mail
begging for money – I have received hundreds of these – so it too
gets deleted. And number 9 is clearly a professional request, so I’ll
read that one.
These decisions were not too hard, were they? You should nd
little trouble in distinguishing the serious professional messages on
the one hand from the junk mail and the childish fumblings on the
other. When your email turns up in my inbox, which group will I
assign it to?
The bad examples above illustrate a few more features of subject
lines that deserve a mention. To start with, do not write your subject
line all in capital letters, but do capitalize the rst letter of the rst
word. We return to the subject of capital letters later in this chapter.
Next, make sure your subject line is written in good English. The
missing question mark in number 6, and the appalling illiteracy of
number 7, are good examples of the sort of thing you should not be
writing. Finally, do not include the word urgent in your subject line,
unless your message really does urgently involve someone’s life or
security – or, in a strictly business context, a deadline. Writing
urgent just to draw attention to yourself, or just to try to pressure
your recipient, is an o ence that ought to get you banned from the
Internet.
Try to keep your subject line short – no more than six or seven
words. Anything longer is pointless, because the excess will be
chopped o when the subject line is displayed in your recipients’
inboxes. The full subject line will be visible once your mail is
opened, but meanwhile you have to persuade your recipients that
they want to open it. Suppose you have chosen this as your subject
line:
The recently agreed increase in Venezuelan crude-oil production
What many of your recipients will see in their inboxes is something
like this:
The recently agreed increase in Venezuelan crud

The problem here is that the most important words have been left
for the end, where they have been chopped. If you must use a long
subject line, you should at least try to ensure that the rst few
words convey the general subject matter. Here is an improved
version:
Venezuelan crude-oil production: the recently agreed increase

Now the worst that can happen in your readers’ inboxes is this:
Venezuelan crude-oil production: the recently

And this, I hope you will agree, is an improvement.

I am not just joking here. Only the other day, I opened my inbox
and saw this subject line staring at me:
Searching for some information about

And this, of course, was no help at all. The sender had wasted his
subject line by lling it with useless words, leaving the essential
words for the end, where they had been chopped because of the
length limit.
Get the essential words in early, and avoid padding out the
subject line with useless words. If you nd this di cult, then spend
a few minutes a day practising. And here is a handy rule of thumb:
never put the word information into a subject line. This word is
always a waste of space, space that could be used to explain what
your message is about.
As it happens, when I opened the message whose subject line I’ve
just been discussing, I found that the full subject line provided by
the questioner was this:
 Searching for some information about a certain article

This was, to say the least, disappointing. It seems that the sender
just could not bring himself to say what he wanted in so many
words – at least, not in his subject line. Instead, he resorted to
vague, coy, roundabout words that never got the job done.
If your message is long, it is courteous to add the comment
‘[long]’ to your subject line. For this purpose, ‘long’ is commonly
understood as ‘more than one hundred lines’. So, if you’re writing
two hundred lines on the Mittal a air (a recent political imbroglio
in Britain), your subject line might look like this: The Mittal a air
[long]. Doing so warns your readers that opening this message when
they have only a few free moments is not a good idea.
If your message is a question, you should start the subject line
with the sequence ‘Q:’. This is explained in chapter 7, which deals
with asking questions.
If your message is a request for action, then you would be wise to
start the subject line with ‘Req:’. An example:
Req: Open Day desk on Saturday

Even before they open this message, the recipients will realize that
they are being asked to undertake some kind of action.
If your message is purely for information, and it requires no
response of any kind from your recipients, then you should start the
subject line with ‘FYI:’, which stands for ‘for your information’. An
example:
FYI: Open Day desk on Saturday

Now, in great contrast to the last message, this one makes it

instantly clear to the recipients that they are simply being noti ed
of what is going on, and that they are not being asked to do
anything.
 Do you see how helpful and considerate these conventions are?
The thoughtful and skilful use of subject lines makes life very much
easier for the people you mail. If you have trouble writing
appropriate subject lines, then you should devote some time and
e ort to learning how to compose good ones. Your emails will be far
more e ective as a result.
You should not begin your subject line with ‘Re:’, which is Latin
for ‘about, concerning’. This item does not mean ‘here is what my
message is about’. It means ‘I am replying to your mail with the
following subject’, and it is inserted automatically by your mailer
when you reply to a message, as explained in chapter 8. Some junk
mailers make a habit of attaching this ‘Re:’ to their junk mail, in the
hope of persuading gullible recipients that the junk is a genuine
reply. Experienced users of email are not deceived, and, if you make
the mistake of writing ‘Re:’, your mail may be taken for junk and
deleted at once.
There is one more special case. If your mail deals with a
con dential matter, then it is strongly advisable to make this clear
in the subject line. In most cases, I recommend using this word as
the entire subject line:
Con dential

There is a good reason for this. Suppose you add a few words
explaining what the con dential message is about:
Con dential: James Bannister

This may be slightly helpful to your recipient, but it has the

unfortunate consequence that anyone who happens to walk past and
glance at your recipient’s screen may see this heading, and therefore
realize at once that con dential messages are being exchanged
about James Bannister. And this partly defeats the point of being
con dential in the rst place.
3.5 WRITING IN PLAINTEXT
Without exception, you should write your emails in plaintext.
Plaintext is ordinary text, the kind you produce by using the
characters on your keyboard, with no special keys like Command or
Alt, and no other software at all.
This may seem blindingly obvious, but there are quite a few
people out there who don’t understand it. A couple of times a week,
I receive emails which have been composed in HTML, the special
markup language used for constructing web pages. An email in
HTML looks like this:
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE></TITLE>
<STYLE type=text/css>TD {
FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 12px; FONT-FAMILY: tahoma}
A:hover {
COLOR: #0000 }

And so on, for page after page.

Well, some fancy mailers can interpret HTML and display the
result in glorious Technicolor, but my mailer can’t, and all I see is
lines and lines of meaningless HTML code. No doubt the text
message is in there somewhere, but the sender is a fool if he thinks
I’m going to wade through acres of gibberish to locate some English
words, and I delete every such message at once – as do most people.
Don’t compose emails in HTML unless you are certain that all your
recipients can deal with HTML messages.
Even worse, several times a week I get emails which consist of
nothing but gibberish from beginning to end, like this example:
§&@’œ_•±a7¬Z>‘A§F°§3_7æ|¶
*m~_^©TM33@!±_=_/f\_··a%i07
And so on, perhaps for several pages. You get the picture. Even the
subject line looks like this.
It appears that the dim-witted senders have foolishly composed
these messes in the source code of a word processor, or some other
piece of software, and then released them in this form. Very few
mailers can cope with this kind of thing, and you must be an idiot if
you think this is a good way of sending emails.

3.6 SALUTATION
In a letter, the salutation is the opening words, like Dear Sir or Dear
Amanda. Do you need a salutation in an email, and, if so, what
should it be?
There is probably no issue in email on which there is so little
agreed policy as here. No established convention exists, and in
practice usage varies enormously.
When you’re mailing a friend, you are unlikely to have many
problems in deciding how to address that friend. But mailing a
stranger presents all kinds of complications.
To start with, you may not even know the sex of the person you
are mailing. You may feel pretty con dent about the sex of
somebody named Peter or Elizabeth, or even of somebody from
another country named Sophia or Karl-Heinz. But foreign names
present all kinds of obstacles. For example, Andrea is a female name
in English, but it’s male in Italian. And Jan is female in English, but
it’s male in several other European languages.
Non-English names can be impossible to guess. What do you make
of these personal names: Spanish Pilar, French Odile, Basque Itziar,
Welsh Iolyn, Irish Irial, Hungarian Imre? The rst three are female,
the last three male. More complicated is the name Inge, which can
be either male or female in Danish or in German, but which is
strictly male in Swedish; the female form in Swedish is Inga.
Moreover, names from most Asian and African languages are
unlikely to reveal the sex of the owner to an English-speaker:
Vietnamese Phuong or Japanese Motoka?. (Both are female.)
Even English names can be treacherous. In the USA, the names
Vivian and Hilary are strictly female, but in Britain they are
sometimes conferred on men. In Britain, Marion is strictly female,
but American bearers of the name have included Marion Morrison
(better known as the tough-guy lm actor John Wayne) and Marion
Motley, one of the roughest, toughest American football players of
all time. We have sexually ambiguous names like Chris and Sandy.
And not everybody realizes that the English name Loreto is female.
Just to complicate things still further, some peoples, such as the
Hungarians, the Chinese and the Japanese, normally write their
names surname rst – though they may turn their names round
when dealing with outsiders.
All this means that writing Dear Mr Mendizabal or Dear Ms Adler
can be a risky business. And, as a further complication, there are
women who dislike the title Ms and who insist on being known as
Mrs or Miss. These women often make their preference clear in their
email signatures, but, if you haven’t yet seen their email signatures,
this isn’t much help.
If the person you are mailing is an academic, then you are
probably safe in writing Dear Dr McCarthy, since almost every
academic holds a doctorate. Less advisable is writing Dear Prof.
Danvers. In the USA and Canada, and in other countries using the
American system of academic ranks and nomenclature, almost every
academic does indeed hold the title Professor. However, in Britain,
in Europe, and in much of the rest of the world, very few academics
hold the title Professor. In my experience, though, not many
academics will take o ence at either style, since at least it is clear
that you are trying to be courteous.
What about throwing caution to the winds and addressing the
other person by rst name? Many people will tell you that email is
an informal medium, and that quick use of rst names is therefore
acceptable. I am not so sure.
 Americans are famous for shifting to rst names almost instantly.
But there are di erences among Americans. California, for example,
is famously laid back, while Boston and Philadelphia are altogether
more buttoned-up.
Outside the States, English-speakers are often a little less quick to
adopt rst names. Britons are more cautious about using rst names
than are Americans, though they are much more relaxed about this
now than they were thirty or forty years ago, when middle-class
British men commonly addressed one another by surname alone, a
practice which Americans nd o ensive.
Things can be very di erent in other languages. Addressing a
German-speaker by his rst name when he hasn’t invited you to do
so is a large faux pas. And addressing a speaker of Japanese by his
rst name in almost any circumstances at all is a grievous blunder.
The rules for using names vary considerably from one society to
another.
You might try something noncommittal, like Good morning or
Good afternoon, but these are a bad idea, since you have no idea
what time of day it will be locally when anybody reads your mail.
Remember, when it’s 10 a.m. in California, it’s 6 p.m. in Britain, and
it’s dark in Asia. The even more noncommittal Good day sounds sti
to many Americans, though the Australian G’day is understood and
accepted by almost all English-speakers as polite and friendly. But
you can’t use this if you’re not Australian.
All this still doesn’t answer the question we started with: what, if
anything, should go into the salutation? Well, I can’t give you a
de nitive answer. The commonest way out is to use no salutation at
all, and almost everybody considers this acceptable in emails. But, if
omitting the salutation makes you uncomfortable, you are on your
own. Do your best to come up with something polite, and keep your
ngers crossed that you haven’t misguessed your recipient’s sex.
The exception is emails that are strictly business – for example,
those sent by business rms to customers or suppliers. An email of
this kind must have a salutation, and that salutation should be
exactly what would appear if the message were being enclosed in a
letter instead of an email.

3.7 SOME ELEMENTS OF COURTESY

If you are mailing a stranger, you must explain who you are and
why you are mailing your recipient. This is no more than common
courtesy. Email is no excuse for intruding upon somebody you don’t
know. Email gives you no right to demand somebody’s attention,
and still less to demand a response.
Regardless of who you are mailing, don’t write anything you
wouldn’t say face to face. When you are sitting in front of your
machine, it is easy to get the impression that other people are no
more than remote disembodied abstractions. But, of course, they are
real people, and careless emails can hurt their feelings just as much
as a public dressing-down.
When you are making a request, write please or could you. Avoid
writing I need, which sounds arrogant and supercilious.

3.8 WEBSITE EMAIL POP-UPS

Sometimes the owner of a website provides an email link. If you
want to mail the owner, all you have to do is to click on the email
address, and a little window will pop up on the screen for you to
type your message into, with the address line already lled in.
This is perhaps convenient, but there are a couple of drawbacks.
First, these pop-up windows are much narrower than ordinary email
windows, and so your message will be squeezed into annoyingly
short lines when it arrives. Second, since you are not using your
own mailer, your signature will not be inserted automatically, and
you will have to remember to type it in at the end of your message.
I nd these drawbacks decidedly annoying. Consequently, I often
just copy the recipient’s email address into the address line of a new
message on my own mailer, and then I go ahead just as I would with
any other email. You can do the same if, like me, you are more
comfortable using your own mailer.

Chapter summary:

• Double-check the address line

• Write an informative subject line
• Use ‘Q’, ‘Req’ and ‘FYI’ as appropriate, but never ‘Re’
• Write in plaintext
 4
Presentation and Organization

4.1 using good english

At this point I am probably going to make you nervous. In spite of
what you may have been told about the informality of email, you
should write your business emails in the best standard English you
can muster. And I stress standard English.
Why do you need to write emails in standard English? There are
several reasons, all of them good.
First, it is a blunt fact that quite a few people will interpret a poor
command of standard English as a sign of low intelligence. This is
not fair, of course, but it’s the way things are. And it is not in your
interest to give anybody the impression that you are an idiot.
Second, there are many more people who will simply be insulted
by poor English, or even by typos. These people will react as
follows: ‘If he can’t be bothered to make more e ort than this, then
I’m not going to waste my time on him.’ Again, it is not going to
help you to o end or annoy the people you are mailing, or to
convince them that you do not deserve a reply.
Third, standard English is far more highly elaborated than any
other variety of English. By this I mean that standard English has
been developed in ways that will allow you to achieve any goal you
may have in mind when dealing with strangers. Standard English
provides the vocabulary and the structures to express anything you
may want to express in a completely explicit manner.
Finally, standard English is agreed upon. There is an established
set of conventions making up standard English: vocabulary, spelling,
punctuation, grammar and word use. When we write in standard
English, we can be reasonably con dent that our readers will
understand our meaning. The countless non-standard varieties of
English around the globe di er greatly from one another, and
departures from standard English are therefore far more likely to
produce confusion and misunderstanding.
Matters are slightly complicated by the existence of two slightly
di erent versions of standard English: the British standard and the
American standard. The di erences between these are not great, but
they are very conspicuous, especially in spelling. You should, of
course, try to stick to one version or the other, since mixing the two
will please nobody.
If English is not your mother tongue, and you are worried that
your imperfect English may produce a bad impression, then stop
worrying. Practically nobody will mind if your non-native English is
imperfect, so long as your messages are comprehensible.
It is native speakers of English who must be on their mettle. Bad
English from native speakers is what upsets so many readers.
It is beyond the scope of this book to o er detailed advice on how
to write English well. If you need to work on your English, there are
many useful books which you can consult. Two helpful Penguin
books, both by R. L. Trask, are Mind the Ga e: The Penguin Guide to
Common Errors in English(for spelling, grammar and word use) and
The Penguin Guide to Punctuation.
Here I will mention just a few basic points.
One: do not use ‘simpli ed’ spellings like thru for through, or nite
for night. Such non-standard spellings will greatly annoy many
readers, and they may puzzle readers who are not native speakers of
English. Stick to standard spellings.
Two: do your best to use standard punctuation. Poor punctuation
can make an email very hard to follow. And omitting punctuation
altogether, as a few pathetic souls do, is grotesquely unacceptable.
Three: keep your punctuation under control. Never pile up
exclamation marks: !!! Such messes look breathless and
schoolgirlish, and they are entirely out of place in a serious email.
4.2 PARAGRAPHING
If your message is more than a few lines long, you should break it
up into paragraphs, in such a way that each paragraph introduces a
new point, however minor. And these paragraphs should be short –
no more than seven or eight lines at the most.
Some people have trouble with this, and they produce enormous
paragraphs that drag on for dozens of lines – fty, sixty, seventy,
eighty lines or more. Such huge paragraphs are bad in any kind of
writing, but they are especially bad in emails. Why? Because the
reader can see only a small part of the message at once, the part
that ts into the window on the mailer. The absence of good
paragraphing forces the reader to scroll through a long and dense
mass of writing, trying to keep his place in the process, and possibly
getting lost. No reader will thank you for this, and some readers will
give up in exasperation.
If you su er from the problem of endless paragraphs, then you
will just have to take yourself in hand and force yourself to divide
your text into short paragraphs. Otherwise, the outcome will be that
readers’ hearts will sink when they see your name in their inboxes,
and their ngers will start twitching towards the Delete button.
You should put a blank line at the end of each paragraph –
otherwise, the paragraphs will be jammed together densely, and
much of the value of paragraphing will be lost. And you should not
indent the rst line of each paragraph. Indenting is normal in many
other kinds of writing, but it doesn’t travel well electronically, and it
may cause havoc on your readers’ screens. Don’t indent.

4.3 FORMATTING

I assume that your typeface and your line length have been properly
set, as explained in chapter 2. But there are some other points worth
mentioning.
 Do not hit the Return key (the carriage return) at the end of a
line. The presence of carriage returns in your message may badly
mess up the way it looks on your recipients’ machines. Just keep
typing, and let your mailer wrap (start a new line whenever
required).
As far as possible, you should refrain from using the Tab key.
Tabs and indents may look nice on your screen, but they don’t travel
well, and they may have the e ect of scrambling your words on
your recipients’ screens.
This fact makes life di cult when you want to construct columns
in your message. The ordinary way of making columns, of course, is
to use the Tab key. But not all mailers will interpret the Tab
commands as you intend, and the result on some screens may be
chaos.
The other way of making columns is just to count out white
spaces. This avoids the problems with the Tab key, but it runs into
di culties of its own. There are di erent kinds of typefaces –
di erent, that is, in the way the characters are spaced out on the
screen – and consequently your painstakingly aligned columns may
disintegrate on your readers’ screens.
So far as possible, it is best to avoid mailing columns. But I know
there are times when columns are unavoidable. On these occasions,
all you can do is to set up your columns in one way or the other and
hope for the best.
Another thing you should stay away from is the special characters
called control characters; these are discussed in some detail in
chapter 5.
I turn now to a venerable question: should you type two blank
spaces between sentences, or only one? In the days of manual
typewriters, there was something of a convention among typists,
particularly in the United States but not only there, that two white
spaces should be typed between sentences. Many keyboard users
today – including me – still automatically type those two white
spaces. I type all my emails this way, and nobody has ever
complained to me about a problem. But some experienced
commentators report that typing two spaces can upset certain
mailers, and they recommend typing only one white space between
sentences.
I guess you should stick with whichever convention you are
comfortable with, unless one of your recipients reports a problem.
On occasion, you may want to copy a portion of text from a
document on your computer, perhaps a word-processed document,
and to paste it into an email. If you do this, you must check the
result. Quite often, this pasting process will wreck the formatting of
the original, and the words that appear in your email will be
scrambled into an unholy mess. If this happens, you must
painstakingly clean up the mess, in order to produce something
which is neat and easy to read. Leaving the mess in your mail is
intolerably o ensive.
Finally, if you have doubts about the appearance of your mail,
you can check it by sending it rst to yourself, in order to see what
it looks like on a recipient’s screen. Unfortunately, if you do this,
and you then try to send the result to somebody else, you will
probably nd that your mailer has turned the whole message into a
giant quotation, marked o by angle brackets, as explained in
chapter 8.

4.4 GETTING TO THE POINT

Some people, when writing emails, nd it very di cult to get to the
point. These people burble on at length about this and that, lling
up a chunk of screen, and then stop, without ever making it clear
what they are expecting from the recipient.
Here is an example, directed at an editor in a publishing house:
We in the Marketing Department have become concerned about
Kozlowski’s book. Sales of this book were healthy for four years, but
in the last year they have dropped substantially. It may be that the
book needs updating, or it may be that the recent partially similar
book from Global is taking away sales. Certainly we cannot allow
our book to remain on our list if sales continue to decline.
Now, what is the recipient supposed to do about this message?
Urge the author to revise his book? Ask someone to examine the
Global book and decide whether it is providing strong competition?
Remove the book from the list? How can he tell? The message gives
him no clue.
There is very little point in sending an email like this one. Clearly
the sender is hoping to get something done, but no reader can tell
what that is. The sender should have spelled out exactly what is
expected from the recipient. Here is an improved version:
We in the Marketing Department have become concerned about Kozlowski’s book.
Sales of this book were healthy for four years, but in the last year they have dropped
substantially. We cannot allow the book to remain on our list if sales continue to
decline. Can we therefore ask you to do two things?

1. Ask a suitable person to look at the recent partially similar Global book and at
Kozlowski’s book and decide whether the problem is strong competition or the
growing outdatedness of our book.

2. If outdatedness appears to be a problem, ask the author to revise his book urgently.

If the problem proves to be nothing but competition, we’ll have to consider our
position later.

This version is e ective: now the recipient knows exactly what is

expected of him.
The best way to avoid sending such pointless emails is to plan
ahead, to think carefully about what you are trying to achieve
before you touch your keyboard.

4.5 ENUMERATION
Sometimes your email consists largely of a list of brief points. In this
circumstance, you should consider presenting these points as an
enumeration. An enumeration puts across what you have to say
crisply, tersely and e ectively. Here is an example:
The work on ‘Proto-World’, the hypothetical ancestor of all languages, is dismissed by
linguists for the following reasons:

1. The method used is merely the accumulation of miscellaneous resemblances, a

procedure which was dismissed as worthless by linguists over 200 years ago.

2. The authors make no attempt to explain what they count as a ‘resemblance’, and
they rely solely on their own unsupported judgements.

3. In practice, their work shows that they are willing to accept anything at all as a
‘resemblance’, if it suits them to do so.

4. They show no awareness of the need to calculate a background score of

resemblances arising wholly by chance, and to demonstrate that their data exceed
chance by a signi cant margin.

5. On the rare occasion when they attempt any calculations at all, they invariably get
those calculations horrendously wrong.

6. They decide in advance what conclusions they want to reach, and then they go
trawling for scraps of evidence that appear to support those conclusions.

7. They present only the data that suit their purposes, and they silently suppress all
contrary data.

8. The data which they do present are twisted, distorted and mangled almost out of
recognition, in order to make them t the required conclusions.

9. Some of their data do not exist at all, and have been fabricated by the authors.

10. hey ignore or wave away the conclusions of erudite specialists based on
generations of painstaking study.
If your message lends itself to presentation by enumeration, this
choice can be highly e ective in getting your thoughts across.
Notice, though, that you need to leave a blank line after each point.
Otherwise, the points will be scrunched together, and most of the
e ectiveness will be lost.
If you like, you can use bullet points instead of numbers. True
bullet points (•) can’t be transmitted by email, but you can use
asterisks as a substitute. But, if you have more than two or three
points, numbers are probably better, since numbers help readers to
keep track of where they are.
Enumerations make life easier for your recipients. Those
recipients can see at a glance how many points you are raising and
just what those points are. They will nd it easy to respond to
individual points, and you in turn will immediately understand
which responses belong to which points.
Especially when you are expecting your recipients to respond, use
enumerations at every opportunity. Your recipients will thank you,
and you will get more work done with less bother.

4.6 BREVITY
No email should be longer than it needs to be. Unnecessary length
adds to the cost of sending and receiving a message, and it wastes
the time of the recipients who have to wade through the mail.
Of course, some mail messages have to be long. However, if your
message is long, try to summarize it in your rst sentence or your
rst paragraph. Doing so makes life a good deal easier for your
readers.
Long messages are especially likely to su er from transmission
glitches and thus to lose their nal parts. Making sure that your
signature appears at the end of your mail, as explained in chapter 2,
will help your readers to know that they have received the whole
message. But there is another and more explicit device. In a long
message, you can type the word END at the end of the text, and tell
your readers in your opening line that you have done so. If you do
this, your readers will know for certain whether they have received
the full message or not.

4.7 ABBREVIATIONS
I work in a department of Linguistics and English Language. When
my colleagues and I email one another on departmental business,
we commonly abbreviate Linguistics to Lx and English Language to EL.
This is ne. After all, we use these words all the time, and using the
abbreviated forms saves us some typing time. There is no di culty
about using the short forms, since everybody in the department is
used to them and understands them at once.
But we don’t use these abbreviations outside our department.
When we need to mail anyone else in the university, we write the
words out in full. We have to, because we can’t be sure that anyone
else will be able to understand our abbreviated forms. After all, we
have no idea what short forms might be usual among the faculty in
Art History or Chemistry, or among the sta in the nance o ce,
and we wouldn’t be pleased if these people dropped their
incomprehensible abbreviations on us.
And this is something you should keep in mind when writing
emails: don’t use abbreviated forms. It’s ne to use the short forms
that are used by all speakers of English, like Mr, a.m., BC,FBI and
UN. And it’s also acceptable to write 17th century in place of
seventeenth century, since there is no possibility that any reader will
misunderstand the short form. But that’s as far as it goes. Except
when you are certain that an abbreviated form will be instantly
understood by every person reading your mail, you must avoid short
forms and write things out in full. And I advise against using the
ampersand, &. Write out the word and.
It is terrible practice to write something like this in a public email:
In reply to Jill Handley’s comments on the evol hist of monogamy, I’d like to remind
e/o that Markovich’s comp modelling in the 1980s showed that monog behav would
 always emerge when the period of parental care of o spring exceeded 1 year.

Almost all readers will nd this sort of thing irritating and

distracting. And annoying your readers is too great a price to pay for
the trivial bene t of saving seven seconds of writing.
There is another point. Countless thousands of the people who use
email are not native speakers of English, and non-native speakers
may have some di culty in following abbreviated forms. Those
people are doing you the huge courtesy of using your language,
English. You can a ord to burn seven seconds on the return
courtesy of writing emails that are as clear as possible.
There is a particular kind of abbreviation which has become
unpleasantly frequent in some quarters. I’m talking about things like
IMHO for ‘in my humble opinion’ and AFAIK for ‘as far as I know’.
Some people have somehow acquired the notion that inserting these
things into emails is good practice. Not so: this is a very bad idea.
Why?
First, the sentiment expressed by the words ‘in my humble
opinion’ is false modesty. If you think your view is valuable enough
to announce electronically, perhaps all over the world, then you do
not truly believe that your opinion is ‘humble’, and you should not
pretend otherwise.
Second, the expression is pointless. If you are expressing your
opinion, then, unless your writing is so bad that your message is
incomprehensible, anybody with half a brain can see that you are
expressing your opinion. Typing extra material in order to tell your
readers that you are giving your opinion is therefore a gross waste
of time. So, by typing IMHO, you have not saved any time: you have
merely wasted your time. And the same goes for the elaborated
version IMNSHO, which means ‘in my not-so-humble opinion’.
I can’t raise the same objection to AFAIK. Unlike IMHO, this one
genuinely has some content. But I’ve just tested my own slow and
inept typing, and it took me a grand total of four seconds to type out
as far as I know in full. Is your time really so scarce and valuable that
saving four seconds in typing an email is more important than
ensuring that all your readers will understand you at once? Are you
really certain that everybody in the world will understand AFAIK
anyway?
The same goes for OTOH ‘ on the other hand’, BTW‘by the way’,
RSN ‘ real soon now’, TIA ‘ thanks in advance’, IWBNI ‘ it would be
nice if’, and many others in this vein. Most of these will be
understood by readers who have years of experience with email,
and you are probably safe in using them with friends who have such
experience, but they should be avoided in mailing strangers.
Even an experienced user may at times be ummoxed by one of
these creations. The abbreviation YMMV is an American creation;
many Americans understand it, but Net-users outside the States may
be ba ed by it. The force of it is ‘I don’t guarantee that this will
work the way I have described it’, and the letters stand for ‘your
mileage may vary’, a disclaimer commonly heard in American TV
commercials for cars.
Stay away from these toys. Saving a few seconds of your time is
less important than ensuring that you are clearly understood. And
tossing these things into your mail just to demonstrate that you are
au fait with them is childish.
Finally, I have just recently begun seeing emails like this one for
the rst time:
I need 2 nd some work on women’s speech 4 an SA I am riting. R U aware of any
work set in Britain?

This is an example of the style used in text messaging with mobile

phones. Now, if I described this as ‘unacceptable’ in emails, I would
hardly be doing justice to the truth. Writing emails in such a way is
unspeakably ghastly. Anybody who sees this kind of mess in his
inbox is probably going to decide at once that the sender is an
imbecile. Don’t do it. This is even worse than writing in capital
letters, the subject of my next section.
4.8 CAPITAL LETTERS
Astonishingly frequent are emails written entirely in capital letters. I
get several of these every week. Here is a typical example:
I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT LEARNING A SECOND LANGUAGE AND
THE SOURCES OF MOTIVATION THAT CAN HELP A NEW LEARNER CARRY ON IS
THE TEACHER PART OF THE MOTIVATION, THE ENVIRONMENT…

This example has many other problems: almost no punctuation,

sentences run together, second sentence incomplete. But the big
problem is those capital letters.
First, as anybody will tell you, capital letters are the electronic
equivalent of screaming. You must therefore never write in capital
letters, since this practice is considered intolerably rude by
everybody on the Internet.
On top of this, though, writing in capital letters is unspeakably
childish. Small children learn to write in capital letters rst, and
only later do they learn the small letters. If you write in capital
letters, you will give everybody the impression that you are an idiot
child who has not yet learned the small letters – or at least that you
are an idiot who has not yet noticed that the rest of the world writes
in mixed capital and small letters.
Writing in capital letters is one of the dumbest mistakes you can
make. Don’t do it. There is no excuse for it. (Possible exception: see
below.)
On the other hand, it is essential to write the capital letters which
are required by the ordinary rules of English orthography: at the
beginning of each sentence, and at the beginning of names and
certain other words. Writing something like this will impress
nobody:
i can’t agree with richard elliot’s analysis of french verb phrases, the analysis looks
super cially elegant, but that elegance is achieved, i believe, only by stretching anne-
marie dupont’s well-known generalization further than it was ever meant to go.
Why do people write in this bizarre way? Are they too lazy to use
the Shift key? Have they not discovered the Shift key? Are they so
slow-witted that they have never noticed that nobody writes English
in this way?
Recently I received a mail written like this, and I asked the sender
why she was doing it. She replied that she had been told that using
capital letters in email was rude! Well, there’s a lesson here. The
people who warned her against capital letters no doubt believed
that they were making themselves entirely clear – and yet their
advice was badly misinterpreted. This is a sobering reminder of just
how easy it is for us to misunderstand one another’s words, and a
reminder therefore of the importance of making every e ort to
produce emails that are as clear and as unambiguous as they can
possibly be.
There is another possibility, of course. Perhaps you write without
capital letters because you have your own individual ideas about
how English should be written, and you are eager to let everyone
know how excellent your ideas are. Well, if so, I’ve got news for
you: nobody is interested. Readers will only be interested, if at all,
in what you have to say, and saying it in such an eccentric way will
only annoy those readers and distract their attention from the
content of your message. Forget it. Remember: email is not the place
to express your personality. And it is also not the place to shove
down every reader’s throat your opinions about subjects that are of
no relevance to your content.

Exception: There is just one conceivable special case which can

justify writing either entirely in capital letters or entirely in small
letters. That occurs when you are disabled, and you have trouble
using the Shift key. In such a circumstance, you may nd it more or
less essential to avoid using the Shift key, and so you may be forced
to write in capitals or without capitals. This is completely
understandable, but how will anyone know? You can simply tell
people, of course, but perhaps you would rather not announce your
disability to the world. In this case, I can only suggest that you use
the Caps-lock key as a replacement for the Shift key. This is
cumbersome, but it works.

4.9 STYLE
No aspect of writing is harder to teach than good style, and I’m not
going to try to give you lessons in style here. Nevertheless, I can
usefully draw attention to a few common failings which you should
try to avoid.
The rst is pomposity. In my experience, this is not a particularly
common failing in emails, since most poor emailers err on the side
of excessive casualness, not on the side of excessive stu ness. But
every now and again I see a message like this one:
I am doing some research on the history of Spanish, but I’m having trouble nding any
information. Can you suggest some good places to look?

The problem here is this. The questioner plainly knows nothing at

all about the history of Spanish, and he doesn’t even know where to
look to nd out something about this topic. Yet he assures us
solemnly that he is doing research. But writing an essay on a topic
you initially know nothing about is not what most of us understand
by the term research. The questioner is therefore being pointlessly
pompous.
He should have written something like this:
I’m trying to nd out something about the history of Spanish…

or
I’ve been asked to write an essay on the history of Spanish…

As always, keep your writing plain, direct and simple. Don’t put on
airs, and don’t pretend to be grander than you are.
 One of the on-line guides to email which I consulted while
preparing this book, one which is in most respects excellent,
astonishingly advises you to use big words when you want to
impress recipients with your importance. This is dreadful advice.
Foolishly tossing around a few big words may allow you to impress
the odd dimwit, but most people who read the result will draw the
conclusion – probably the correct conclusion – that you are a
pompous idiot. Don’t try it.
I sometimes get emails from some of the most eminent and
distinguished scholars in my eld. All of these people write in a
plain, una ected style. They say what they have to say, and they
never try to impress the rest of us with their importance. You should
follow their example.
The second failing is the opposite: breeziness. You will impress no
one by writing like this:
Hi, guys!!! Gotta little poser for ya here. Seems the latest gene map of our boring old
continent Europe shrieks about a big link between our beret-wearing Basque pals and
those chilly northern reindeer-herders the Lapps. How ya gonna ‘splain *that*?

Fortunately, the emailers who su er from this disease are not

numerous, and I don’t see this kind of thing more than once or twice
a year.
Far more common than pomposity or breeziness is wordiness.
Wordiness is a bad habit which is much encouraged by bureaucratic
paperwork. Many people whose working lives consist largely of
dealing with paperwork nd that they can’t break the habit of using
six abby words where one simple word will do, even in emails and
even in conversation. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
Bad Good

on a daily basis every day

on a regular basis regularly or

all the time
 at this moment in now or at
time present

in an emergency in an
situation emergency

prior to initiation before

of employment starting
work

If you su er from this problem, you would do well to nd a little

time to practise writing plain English. Your colleagues will thank
you for it, since no one enjoys wading through globs of such
glutinous English.

4.10 VULGARITY
It should hardly be necessary to warn you against using vulgar or
obscene words in public emails. Even the milder vulgarities are
wholly out of place in a message sent to a stranger, even when they
are clearly intended as jokes and marked as jokes in the manner
described in chapter 5.
There are just two circumstances in which the use of vulgar words
is permissible in a serious email: rst, when you need to quote a
passage containing these words, and, second, when these words
themselves are your subject.
Now, in these circumstances, the use of vulgar words is usually
beyond objection, and, in ordinary writing, it would be normal to
write the o ending words out in full. With email, however, there is
a peculiar complication, and you might be well advised to replace
these words with coy substitutes like f**k and s**t.
The problem is this. Some people, and some organizations, in an
attempt to block out junk mail advertising pornography, have
installed ltering devices on their computers. These lters are
technologically crude, and all they can do at present is to search
incoming mail for particular sequences of letters, and to reject any
mail containing a prohibited sequence. And this can be a nuisance.
Some time ago, a colleague asked publicly for comments on a new
web page he had just posted. I responded with a few comments, and
I was startled to receive a stern message telling me that my message
had been rejected by his computer.
By chance, I ran into him several weeks later, and I told him
about the rejection. He explained to me that he had installed one of
these lters on his machine – and I work at the University of Sussex.
His lter had decided that ‘Sussex was a naughty word, and blocked
my mail.
A few years ago, there was a kerfu e when the citizens of the
English town of Scunthorpe discovered that their emails were being
blocked all over the place. I have never heard whether somebody
managed to x this problem, but you can see the di culties.

4.11 MISUSE OF THE SUBJECT LINE

The purpose of the subject line is to tell your recipients what your
message is about before they open it. Bear in mind that the subject
line is not part of the text of your message. Treating the subject line
as part of your text is bad behaviour. Look at this bad example:
[subject line] Colour photocopier

I need to copy an article from _Scienti c American_. Can anybody tell me where I can
nd one?

Most readers will be ummoxed by this. Below is the proper way of

asking this question:
[subject line] Looking for a colour photocopier

I need to copy an article from _Scienti c American_. Can anybody tell me where I can
nd a colour photocopier?
No one will struggle with this.

4.12 EDITING AND POLISHING

Once you have nished writing your message, it is time to edit it
and proofread it. And I mean this very seriously.
If you are merely mailing a colleague to say Ready for lunch when
you are, there is plainly no point in editing and polishing your
message. This message can hardly be misunderstood, and the odd
typo will cause no harm.
But serious emails to strangers are a very di erent matter. Now it
is of the greatest importance to make a good impression and to be as
clear and accurate as possible. So, you must read through your
message slowly and carefully, looking for typos and correcting
them, and looking also for misstatements, errors of fact, instances of
ambiguous wording, and anything else that might interfere with
your message.
Countless people do not understand this. They routinely dash o a
piece of mail and then re it o without any editing or proofreading
at all. The result in most cases is a message containing a couple of
gross typos, and very often also a message which is di cult to
understand.
Failure to proofread your mail is an expression of contempt for
your recipients. If you fail to proofread, then in e ect you are saying
this: ‘You are so insigni cant that it’s not even worth the bother of
proofreading messages to you.’ Now, is this the impression you want
to give when you approach a stranger? And do you think your
recipients will be pleased at this open display of your attitude?
As always, courtesy in email is not very di erent from courtesy in
other domains. If you can’t be bothered to undertake even the
minimal courtesy of checking your message before you send it, then
you are demonstrating to the whole world that you are a backward
child who has yet to grasp even the most obvious conventions of
proper behaviour.
 But it’s not merely courtesy that’s at issue. An uncorrected typo
can have a devastating e ect on your message. Take me. I have a
curious habit of omitting the word not when I am typing. So, not
infrequently, I nd on proofreading that I have typed this:
You must send anonymous messages.

when I mean this:

You must not send anonymous messages.

You can see how catastrophic such a typo can be. Even though you
may not su er from my problem, you are hardly likely to be an
impeccable typist, and all kinds of damaging errors may creep into
your typing. And just one typo can ruin your message so completely
that the message becomes worthless.
There exist all sorts of electronic props to help you with your
writing: spellcheckers, grammar checkers, style checkers. Assuming
you can get these programs to run on your email, you may nd
them of some use in catching a few blatant errors – though running
a style checker on an email is overkill, and not recommended.
But a spellchecker is no substitute for good spelling. It can catch
some mistakes, but all it can really do is to check whether the word
on the screen exists in its dictionary. It has no way of knowing
whether the word that is there is the word that’s supposed to be
there. So it won’t pick up such common errors as not for now, there
for their, he for the, were for where, and countless others. Moreover, a
spellchecker will not catch an omitted word, like my omitted not
above. You can spellcheck all you like, but you must still proofread
your message carefully before you send it.
Quite apart from catching errors, reading through your text may
reveal other shortcomings. You may decide that one sentence is
ambiguous and misleading. You may nd that you have accidentally
said some thing which is wrong. You may even discover that you
have failed to mention an important point that you had planned to
include.
These are not hypothetical possibilities, remote from the real
world. Every week I receive emails from strangers which are error-
ridden, obscure, hard to follow and on occasion completely
incomprehensible. Failure to edit is a common shortcoming, and I
am privileged to see the awful consequences. Later in this book we’ll
be looking at some genuine examples.
Remember: once you have sent your message, it’s gone, and
nobody can pull it back. All your blunders will be staring out from
the inboxes of your recipients. A little time devoted to editing can
save you a great deal of embarrassment.
But how much time should you devote to editing your message? I
am not suggesting that you should painstakingly wade through your
text eight or ten times, replacing a word here, inserting a comma
there, and generally polishing your words until they glisten. After
all, an email is not an entry in a prize essay competition, and the
search for perfect prose is best left for other contexts.
Nevertheless, you need to strike a balance between editing and
time. Obsessive polishing is out of place, but failure to edit at all is
even worse. Learn to check your mail before you send it.

4.13 FLAMING
The sending of angry and abusive email is called aming, and
nobody likes aming. Most of us get upset once in a while when we
read our email, but most of us manage to avoid aming. Here is a
valuable piece of advice:
Never send an email in anger.

If you nd yourself upset by something you nd in your inbox, don’t

re o an instant reply. There is a large probability that you will
quickly come to regret that hasty reply. Most people who indulge in
aming regret their outburst before very long.
 So, if you’re upset, then wait a while before replying. Wait until
you’ve cooled down. Wait till the next day. If possible, wait until
you can see the funny side of it.
Your reputation is at stake here. Even one thoughtless outburst
may quickly earn you a reputation as a foul-mouthed troublemaker,
and you may discover that your emails are no longer welcome in
some quarters.
There is a custom in some circles of tolerating a brief outburst of
aming providing it is conspicuously marked o as such, like this:
FLAME ON

In my view, McAliste’s ideas are so much cretinous sludge.

FLAME OFF

I suppose this practice is at least better than an uncontrolled

outburst of abuse. But I can’t really endorse it. In emails to
strangers, it is far better to refrain from aming at all.

Chapter summary:

• Write in your best standard English

• Use short paragraphs separated by blank lines
• Plan ahead
• Use enumerations where possible
• Be brief, but not cryptic
• Use capital letters normally
• Edit and proofread your messages
• Don’t ame
 5
Making It Look Nice

5.1 SPECIAL CHARACTERS

There are ninety-four characters which appear on every English-
language computer keyboard. These include the twenty-six small
letters, the twenty-six capital letters, the ten digits, the punctuation
marks, four kinds of brackets, and the characters @ $ % ^ & * + = |
/ \ ~ _ , plus one more that I’ll mention shortly. These ninety-four,
plus the space, are the ASCII characters (the word is pronounced
ASK-ee, with the ‘cat’ vowel). Each one of these ninety- ve
characters is produced by hitting one of the ordinary typewriter
keys on your keyboard, possibly with the shift key. And each one is
expressed electronically by an internationally standard code which
is universally used and understood. In fact, the total number of
ASCII codes is 128, but the other thirty-three are used for purposes
other than encoding characters. Since computers always start
counting with zero, the ASCII codes run from 0 to 127.
Every mailer program on every computer in the English-speaking
world can handle these ninety- ve characters without di culty,
with the exception of that one character I haven’t mentioned yet.
The exception is ASCII code number 35. On an American keyboard,
number 35 represents the hash mark, #. But British keyboards are
di erent. Since the ASCII code was invented in the United States (its
name stands for ‘American Standard Code for Information
Interchange’), it contains the American dollar sign, $, but not the
British pound sign, £, or any other currency symbol. British
manufacturers have found it convenient to make room for the
pound sign on British keyboards, which means that one of the other
symbols has to be removed. The character that has been bounced is
the hash mark, and so code number 35 represents the pound sign on
a British keyboard.
If you have the £ on your keyboard, and you type it into an email,
it will show up as £ on another British machine but as # on all other
machines. Likewise, if you have # on your keyboard, it will show up
variously as # or as £ on other people’s machines. This is the only
case in which the ASCII code may fail to reproduce your typing
faithfully. As a consequence, a sequence like #500 has long been
understood as being equivalent to £500 in email, and in fact the
hash mark is itself sometimes called the ‘pound sign’.
Currency can be a nuisance. But what about all the other useful
characters and symbols that we sometimes like to use? Well, the
technical experts have for years now been promising us software
that can handle everything from the International Phonetic Alphabet
to Chinese characters. This software is based on a system called
Unicode, and the idea is that all software on all machines will one
day work with Unicode. Sadly, though, such software is still rather
scarce, and mailers are feebler than most programs at coping with
unusual characters.
These days, however, most computers(not mailers) can produce
and display a sizeable range of additional characters, such as § ¶ β
© æ. These extra characters are called control characters, since
they are typically produced by combining an ordinary keystroke
with one of the control keys, which have names like Control,
Command and Alt. Note, though, that some keyboards carry a
couple of these on plain-looking keys. For example, my keyboard
has § and ±, which are nevertheless not ASCII characters. And these
characters are electronically encoded by an additional 128 code
numbers, 128 to 255, known as extended ASCII.
Now, you may discover that your mailer program can display at
least some of these additional characters, and you may therefore be
tempted to decorate your emails with them. I have just one word of
advice: don’t
The problem is that most mailers cannot display these special
characters. So, if you include some of them in your emails, your
recipients will see nothing but mysterious coded sequences like
=E38 in place of your pretty characters, and the result will be
unintelligible.
Just to make things worse, the control characters are encoded
di erently on Macs and on PCs. Thus, even if you and your friend
both have machines and mailers that can display these characters, if
one of you has a Mac and the other a PC, things are not going to
work.
So, sad as it may seem when your machine can produce all these
wonderful characters, you must avoid using them in your emails,
and stick resolutely to the ninety- ve ordinary plain vanilla ASCII
characters. If you need to express the other things, you will have to
write them out in English words.
Just to close this section, there is a convention of writing USD (for
‘US dollars’) in place of $ and UKP (for ‘UK pounds’) in place of £,
whenever you anticipate possible di culties. These versions are
always understood.

5.2 DIACRITICS
Diacritics, informally called ‘accents’, are the little dots and
squiggles sometimes added to printed letters to indicate something
about their pronunciation. In English, we make little use of these
things, except in a few names, like Zoë and Brontë, and in words and
phrases of foreign origin, like café, façade, Gemütlichkeit, mañana
and bête noire. Most other European languages, however, make
heavy use of diacritics, and there are times when we want to write
words or names from these languages. What can we do?
These days, many mailers can produce and display at least a few
of the more familiar diacritics, such as é, ü, ñ and ç. If your mailer
can do this, great – but you can’t assume that the people you are
mailing will also have such talented mailers.
If your mailer can produce these things, but your recipient’s
mailer can’t display them, then your recipient is going to see
macaroni wherever you have typed a diacritic. For example, your
typed mañana might appear as mae4%ana, and your Schröder might
show up as Schrq&;7der. This is what happens, and you can see the
problem: many of these will be more or less incomprehensible.
There are three ways of addressing this problem, but not one of
them is wholly satisfactory.
Solution one is to ignore the diacritics altogether. Write façade as
facade, Schröder as Schroder (or as Schroeder, which in fact is
perfectly acceptable in German), mañana as manana, and so on.
With a little goodwill, your readers will be able to follow all of
these, and in practice this is the solution which is most widely used.
Very occasionally, though, this solution can come a cropper in an
embarrassing way. Take Turkish. The Turkish alphabet, uniquely,
makes use of both an ordinary dotted i and an entirely distinct
dotless i. As it happens, the Turkish word sik is harmless and means
only ‘thick’, while the word sik is obscene.
Solution two is to represent the diacritics with following
keystrokes. In this approach, mañana is written as man~ana, déjà
vu as de’ja’ vu, tschüss as tschu’s, détente as de’tente, and so on.
This is a little cumbersome, but at least it preserves the information
carried by the diacritics. However, this solution will not work with
some diacritics, because there are no suitable characters on the
keyboard for representing them.
Solution three is available only if your mailer can produce
diacritics, and it’s really only convenient if you’re using no more
than one or two diacritics. Suppose I’m writing an email in which I
really need to make crucial use of the n-tilde, ñ. My mailer can
produce this, but I know that it will show up as macaroni on some
other people’s mailers. What I can do is this. At the beginning of my
message, I type the following:
I’m using the n-tilde, which on your mailer looks like this: ñ.

Now, all of my recipients whose mailers can display the n-tilde will
see exactly this. But the other people will see something like this:
 I’m using the n-tilde, which on your mailer looks like this: e4%.

These readers will now know that, when the sequence ie4%or
appears on their screens, they should interpret it as iñor (this
happens to be the Basque word for ‘anybody’).

5.3 SUPERSCRIPTS AND SUBSCRIPTS

Mailers cannot display superscripts or subscripts. With superscripts,
there is a conventional way of representing them on screen, using
the character ^, which is on your keyboard. If, for example, you
need to write x2, you can express this in email as x^2. Everybody will
understand this device.
For subscripts, unfortunately, there is no comparable convention.
So, if you want to write the chemical formula for alcohol,
CH3CH2OH, the best you can do is to write CH3CH20H.

5.4 EMPHASIS
Most mailers cannot handle italics, boldface or underlining. This
can be a nuisance, since sometimes we want to emphasize a word or
a phrase.
In order to mark emphasis, a convention has grown up of setting
o the material to be emphasized between a pair of asterisks. Here
is an example:
Relatedness between languages is not demonstrated by compiling lists of miscellaneous
resemblances, and indeed relatedness *cannot* be shown in such a way.

Here the asterisks show that the word cannot is meant to be strongly
stressed. In printing, we might use italics or boldface for this
purpose, but with email the asterisks are the best we can do.
This convention is not yet universal, and some people prefer other
ways of marking emphasis, but the asterisks are both the most
widely used convention and the most satisfactory one, and I
recommend their use.
Another fairly widely used device is reversed angle brackets:
… relatedness >cannot< be shown in such a way.

I don’t like this device as much: I think it’s not as easy on the eye as
asterisks. But, if you prefer it, you’ll be in good company.
One further point. In a serious email, you should not pile up
asterisks or anything else in order to mark emphasis. Things like the
following are poor practice:
… relatedness ***cannot*** be shown in such a way.

… relatedness >>>cannot<<< be shown in such a way.

Such exaggerated emphasis looks schoolgirlish, and it should be

avoided.
You might wonder why we don’t simply resort to capital letters
for emphasis. Why can’t I simply write this?
… relatedness CANNOT be shown in such a way.

Well, many people do write this. But not everybody likes it. As we
saw in chapter 4, capital letters are the electronic equivalent of
shouting, and some readers will consider you rude if you resort to
capital letters. On the whole, it is safer and wiser to stick to the
asterisks.

5.5 TITLES
In ordinary writing, the title of a large work, such as a book or a
lm, is written in italics: The Brothers Karamazov, Raiders of the Lost
Ark. Since italics are not available in email, we need a substitute.
The most widely used convention is to enclose such a title within a
pair of underscores: _The Brothers Karamazov_, Raiders of the Lost
Ark_.
The title of a small work, such as a poem or an essay, is
conventionally enclosed within single quotes: ‘An Irish airman
foresees his death’, ‘A modest proposal’. There is no di culty about
doing the same in an email: ‘An Irish airman foresees his death’, ‘A
modest proposal’.
Note also that we capitalize every signi cant word in the title of a
large work, but it is not necessary to do so in the title of a small
work.

5.6 WRITING ABOUT WORDS AND NAMES

In my own profession of linguistics, we need constantly to write
about words. But almost everybody has occasion to write about
words once in a while. In ordinary print, there are conventions for
doing this, which you should learn and follow, but these
conventions are a little awkward to transfer into email.
When, in ordinary writing, you need to name an English word
which you are talking about, you have two choices: you can either
cite the word in italics, or you can enclose it in single quotation
marks (not double quotes). So, in ordinary writing, either of the
following is acceptable:
The words champagne and campaign have the same origin.

The words ‘Champagne’ and ‘campaign’ have the same origin.

However, in ordinary writing, when you want to name a word from

a language other than English, you must cite it in italics. In many
cases, you will want to provide a brief English translation, or gloss,
and this is done by writing the English gloss immediately after the
word, enclosed in single quotes, with no other punctuation:
The words ‘champagne’ and ‘campaign’ both derive from Latin <campania>‘open
country’.
This is easy and straightforward. But how do we do this inside an
email? Single quotes are no problem, of course, but a mailer can’t
produce italics. So we need a substitute.
In this context, the most widely used substitute for italics is a pair
of angle brackets, like these: < >. Using this convention, my last
example looks like this:
The words ‘champagne’ and ‘campaign’ both derive from Latin <campania> ‘Open
country’.

Here the angle brackets set o the foreign word in a way that is
visually striking but still easy on the eye. This is the convention I
recommend.
There is just one possible di culty with this convention. Some
exceptionally fancy mailers have a problem with angle brackets,
which they interpret as marking instructions for displaying
messages. If your recipients complain about this, then you may have
to nd another solution, such as setting o the foreign material with
a pair of asterisks, in the fashion recommended above for marking
emphasis. But, in all my years of sending emails about language, I
have only once bumped into somebody whose mailer complained
about my angle brackets. So I don’t think you need to worry very
much.
By the way, if you’re wondering why you need to bother to mark
words which you are talking about, the reason is that failure to do
so can confuse your reader badly. Take a look at these two
examples:
The word processor came into use about 1910.

The word ‘processor’ came into use about 1910.

The second statement is true, while the rst is wrong by about

seventy years. As always, it is your responsibility to ensure that
what you have written is clear and unambiguous.
 Names, like words, require special treatment if we are to avoid
obscurity and absurdity. One of the novels on my bookshelf carries
the following surprising statement about the author:
Susanna Gregory is a pseudonym.

This is a preposterous thing to say about Ms Gregory: she may be

many things, but she is assuredly not a pseudonym. What the writer
should have written, of course, is this:
‘Susanna Gregory’ is a pseudonym.

Here the single quotes show that what the writer is talking about is
the name and not the woman. Names, like words, must be enclosed
within single quotes when we write about them, and you should
follow this convention in your email:
‘Susanna Gregory’ is a pseudonym.

5.7 EMOTICONS
Emoticons are the cute little sideways faces produced with
keystrokes from your keyboard. They are meant to suggest
something about the writer’s mental state, as with :-( for ‘I’m
unhappy’ and :^0 for ‘I’m surprised’.
Emoticons – the name means ‘emotional icons’ – are used because
they can be produced, and for no better reason. There is no problem
with using these things when you are mailing close friends, if you
like, though overusing them will quickly make your writing
tiresome. However, with just a single exception, emoticons have
absolutely no place in serious emails, and you should not use them.
The single exception is this one: ;-), commonly known as the
smiley. By universal agreement, this doodah means ‘I’m joking’, and
it is typed at the end of a sentence which is meant to be a joke. Here
is an example:
 Mr Hansen’s new book argues that English was introduced to Britain, not by the
Anglo-Saxons, as the conventional view would have it, but by the Vikings who
conquered England in 1016. Historians will, of course, be eager to learn about this
scholarly breakthrough. ;-)

The point here is that the writer is being sarcastic. Hansen is plainly
a crackpot, and the force of the writer’s sarcastic words is that
historians will want to steer clear of this drivel.
Why do we bother with the smiley? There is a good reason. When
we are speaking, our tone of voice and our expression give it away
quickly that we are joking. But, in writing, including in emails,
these clues are lost. There is therefore a danger that our joking
words will be taken seriously by some readers. The smiley is there
to ensure that this mistake does not happen.
Many regular users of email will tell you that marking your jokes
with smileys is good practice, and I agree. It is surprisingly easy to
write something which in your eyes is an obvious joke but which
some readers will nevertheless take seriously, possibly resulting in
the taking of o ence. Careful use of the smiley will prevent this.
But there is another point about the smiley which people will
rarely tell you, but which is essential for you to understand. The
smiley is not a neutral piece of punctuation, like a comma or a
semicolon. The smiley accompanies a joke, and so it can only be
properly used when it is proper to make jokes in the rst place.
Making jokes in your email is a sign of solidarity. If I make a joke,
I am implying the following: ‘I regard myself as a member of your
group, and therefore I consider that I have the right to make jokes.’
Take me. I am a professional linguist, and I regard myself as a
member of the community of professional linguists. When I mail my
professional colleagues, either individually or collectively, I do not
hesitate to make a joke if I think a joke is appropriate, and of course
I mark my jokes with smileys. But I don’t do this often: I doubt that
I use a smiley more often than once a month. I do not see myself as
the Groucho Marx of my profession, and joking is hardly the point
of my professional emails.
But, when solidarity is absent, then joking is entirely out of place,
and so is the smiley. Again, if you are mailing a bank about a
possible job, then jokes are out of order. Using the smiley is a little
bit like slapping someone on the back, and treating potential
employers like bosom buddies is a horrendous ga e.
There is another point. Don’t assume that a smiley will wash away
all sins. If your words are o ensive, then they are no less o ensive
because a smiley follows. The presence of a smiley does not make
your words or your views any cuddlier than they would be with no
smiley.

5.8 CITING URLS AND EMAIL ADDRESSES

Sometimes you may want to cite a URL, the address of a web page.
Now, every URL begins with the sequence http://, and as a result
there is a common convention of omitting this material when citing
a URL – for example, on your business card. If the URL of your
personal web page is http://www.whiz.net/kmg/index.html, then
you might cite this merely as www.whiz.net/kmg/index.html in
most circumstances.
However, when you cite a URL in an email, it is a good idea to
cite the whole thing, including the http://. The reason for this is
that many mailers today can spot a URL inside an email message
and automatically convert it into a live link, so that anyone reading
the email need only click on the URL in order to go directly to the
web page. This is a great convenience for readers. But quite a few
mailers achieve this by looking for that initial sequence http://. So,
if this sequence is missing, those mailers will fail to create a live
link.
When you cite a URL, you must not put a full stop at the end. It is
a very bad idea to write something like this:
My URL is http://www.whiz.net/kmg/index.htmL
Perhaps you have already spotted the problem. It now looks as
though that nal full stop is part of the URL. Consequently, when a
recipient’s mailer tries to create a live link, it will include that full
stop, which should not be there, and the link won’t work. And a
reader who tries merely to copy the URL into his search engine will
also very likely type in that full stop, and again he won’t get
through. This kind of needless problem can lead to bad-tempered
exchanges.
There are two ways of dealing with this problem. First, you can
type a space at the end of the URL, before the full stop:
My URL is http://www.whiz.net/kmg/index.html.

This may look a bit funny, but it should avoid the problem.
Second, you can make a policy of putting a URL on a line by
itself, with no punctuation:
My URL is http://www.whiz.net/kmg/index.html

Now the full stop has vanished altogether. This may trouble stylistic
purists, but it guarantees that no mailer and no reader can misread
the URL.
Occasionally a URL is so long that it won’t t onto a single line:
The URL you want is

http://uni-muenchen.de/linguistik/
h.-j.bollenbacher/~typologie/data/europ/
nomina.html

In my experience, there is nothing to be done about this. Mailers

which try to convert this string into a live link will fail. Even human
beings may be bewildered and fail to grasp what they are looking at.
About the only thing I can suggest is enclosing the whole thing
within a pair of angle brackets:
 The URL you want is

<http://uni-muenchen.de/linguistik/h.-
j.bollenbacher/~typologie/data/europ/nomina.html>

The mailers will probably still fail, but at least human readers will
now probably see what is going on, so that they can copy the right
material into their search engines.

Similar problems may arise in citing an email address, and the same
solutions are available. It is again a bad idea to write this:
Katie’s email is [email protected].

Sophisticated readers will know that an email address never ends in

a full stop, but you can’t safely assume that all your readers are that
sophisticated. So, type a space:
Katie’s email is [email protected].

Or use a separate line:

Katie’s email is
[email protected]

As always, a few seconds of thought and care on your part can save
your readers a great deal of grief.
(But bear one thing in mind: you must not pass on somebody’s
email address without permission. See section 10.1.)

5.9 TYPING INSTRUCTIONS

Sometimes you may nd it necessary to mail somebody instructions
for doing something on a keyboard, and in this case you will need to
tell your correspondent exactly which keys to hit. This calls for a
little care. Unfortunately, there is as yet no universal set of
conventions for doing this, and several notations are in use.
The name of a key which is not a character key always gets an
initial capital letter: Shift, Return, Control, and so on. Some people
write these names entirely in capitals (SHIFT, RETURN, CONTROL),
but this is hardly necessary. Some people enclose these names in
quotation marks, while others use square brackets or even angle
brackets: Hit ‘Return’ or Hit [Return] or Hit <Return>.
Whichever convention you adopt, the key point is to make sure
that you enclose nothing but the material to be typed. If you write
Hit ‘Return.’ in your email, then you are instructing your reader to
hit rst the Return key and then the full stop, which is not what you
intend. American readers should particularly note this, since
standard American punctuation – unlike standard British
punctuation – requires full stops and other nal punctuation marks
to be placed inside quotation marks, even when they logically don’t
belong there. Write Hit ‘Return’.
If your instructions require the reader to hold down one of the
control keys while hitting another key, then the usual practice is to
name the control key rst, followed by a plus sign and then the
name of the other key. So, if you want your reader to hold down the
Alt key and hit the character 8, then you write this: Type ‘Alt + 8’.
If your reader needs to hold down two control keys, write it like this:
Type ‘Shift + Alt + 3’.
A complication can arise here when one of the control keys to be
pressed is the Shift key. The problem is that not every keyboard puts
all the characters in the same place. For example, on my keyboard
the question mark (?) is on the same key as the slash (/), and it is
the question mark which requires the Shift key to be pressed. But
you might nd that the question mark is somewhere else on your
keyboard, perhaps sharing a key with some other character – let’s
say the equal sign (=) – while the slash might be sharing a key with
the at-sign (@).
In this circumstance, if I want you to hit Alt plus?, then, if I write
Type ‘Shift + Alt + /’, you are going to get the wrong result. The
solution, of course, is to write this instead: Type ‘Alt + ?’. But now
your reader must be alert enough to note that producing the
question mark requires the unmentioned Shift key.

5.10 ASIDES
Some people like to decorate their emails with asides, little editorial
comments expressing the writer’s attitude. There are far too many of
these to list here, and everybody is free to create new ones at will.
Among the common ones are <hollow laughter> to express
cynicism or disillusionment, <hug> to express gratitude, <yawn>
to express boredom, <pleading look> to reinforce a request,
<eg> (‘evil grin’) to express smug satisfaction, and [LOL]
(‘laughing out loud’) or [ROTFL] (‘rolling on the oor laughing’) to
express amusement at what the other person has written.
These things are ne in personal emails, but they are wholly out
of place in business emails. They su er from the same problem as
smileys: their use expresses solidarity, and solidarity cannot be
assumed in mailing strangers. And the abbreviated ones, of course,
may be unintelligible to some readers.

Chapter summary:

• Stick to ASCII characters

• Be cautious with diacritics
• Use a pair of asterisks for emphasis
• Set o English words with single quotes
• Set o foreign words with angle brackets
• Be careful about presenting email addresses, URLs and typing
instructions
 6
Attachments

6.1 SENDING ATTACHMENTS

An attachment is a copy of a document which is already sitting on
your computer, and which you tack onto an email, so that it arrives
at the other end along with your email. In principle, you can attach
a document of any kind – even a photograph – so long as you
already have it on your computer.
In business emails, the most frequent attachments are documents
which have been prepared with specialist software like word
processors or spreadsheets. In private emails, photographs and other
kinds of pictures are probably the most usual attachments.
These days, almost every mailer provides some simple way of
attaching documents to emails. If you haven’t already learned to do
this, you are well advised to nd out. But don’t get carried away. As
we will see shortly, attachments present certain di culties, and you
should not try to send an attachment unless you have a good reason.
In fact, you will be well advised to avoid sending attachments.
Sending attachments just because your machine can send them is a
foolish waste of time, and worse than that. Let’s see why.

6.2 COMPATIBILITY
Mailers are compatible. An email sent from one mailer can be
received and read on any other mailer in the world – providing the
message is written in plaintext and avoids diacritics and special
characters. But attachments are a very di erent matter.
Attachments are created, or placed on your computer, by using
some suitable piece of software. And not all software is the same.
 If your computer is a Mac, then you probably use Mac software.
But, if your computer is a PC, then you probably use Microsoft
software. And here there is a familiar problem: Mac software and
Microsoft software are not compatible. In other words, a document
prepared with one kind of software cannot be opened or read with
the other kind of software. This is just as true of attachments as it is
of anything else. So, if you send an attachment to somebody who
uses a di erent kind of computer from yours, it is highly likely that
the recipient will be unable to open your attachment. And sending
an attachment which cannot be opened is an utter waste of time for
all concerned.
It’s even worse than this. Even if your recipients use the same
kind of machine as you, they may not have installed all of the ashy
software that you have on your machine. So, if you attach a
document which you have created by using some gee-whiz piece of
fancy software, your recipients may still be unable to open your
document, because they don’t have the right software. Even if they
have the same software in principle, your document composed in
HotWire version 9.0 probably can’t be opened by your friends who
are using version 8.6.
This is why you should keep your attachments to a minimum. If
you must send an attachment, keep it simple. Use only the plainest
and most familiar software for creating attachments, and refrain
from using anything fancy. The fancier your software, the greater
the likelihood that the people at the other end won’t be able to open
your attachments.
In fact, before you send an attachment to anybody, it is wise to
check with your intended recipients, in order to nd out whether
they are likely to be able to read your document. Doing so is
courteous and thoughtful, and it is a sign of a professional attitude.
However, if you just re o an attachment without checking,
assuming that everybody in the world uses the same computer as
you and the same software as you, then you are… well, I was
tempted to use another word, but let’s just say you are a little dozy.
 When you do send an attachment, it is very good practice to
explain in the accompanying email exactly what software is
required to open the attachment. Some clever mailers can gure this
out for themselves, but not all can, and it is thoughtless and
o ensive to leave your hapless recipients to fumble about with one
piece of software after another, trying to gure out what is required.
One nal point. There are still some mailer programs in use which
cannot handle attachments at all. If you try to send an attachment to
somebody who is using one of these mailers, all he will get is pages
and pages and pages of gibberish.

6.3 CONVERSIONS
There are various ways of dealing with the compatibility problem.
One simple way is to buy for your computer a set of the other kind
of software. But this is a lot of money to spend just to deal with
attachments.
Another way forward is to attempt conversions. There are ways of
converting a document from one kind of software to another kind.
So, for example, you might be able to convert a document written
on a Mac word processor into Microsoft software. But these
conversions are rather hit-or-miss: the result might be acceptable,
but it might not be. Conversions are not a panacea.
Yet another procedure is to convert documents into something
resembling plaintext. There is a format called RichText, which
resembles plaintext but which usually retains italics, boldface,
underlining, paragraphing and margins, at least. There is a good
chance that your word processor will o er you the choice of a
RichText version. RichText conversions will lose any graphics or
pretty fonts or other fancy stu , but at least the words will probably
be readable by everybody – though I don’t guarantee this, since my
RichText conversions have occasionally turned out looking like a
disaster in a spaghetti factory.
 Again, if you need to send attachments, and you run into
compatibility problems, it is best to talk directly to your recipients
about what can usefully be done, and to try a few possibilities to see
if you can settle on something that works.

6.4 SIZE
There are practical constraints on the size of an attachment. Size is
measured in kilobytes (KB), and many mailers will refuse to carry
attachments which exceed some maximum size. Most commentators
advise you to keep an attachment below 50 KB. This is not large: an
ordinary colour photograph may take up more space than this
(colour photos are notorious for consuming huge amounts of space).
If you need to send an attachment which is much bigger than this,
it is courteous and wise to get in touch with your recipients rst and
to check that what you propose is acceptable to them.
One way of handling a large attachment is to reduce its size by
applying to it one of the several programs which compress a
document (squeeze it into a much smaller space). Compressing your
attachments saves space, but it adds another complication: your
recipients must have the software required to restore the document
to its original size. If they can’t decompress it, they won’t be able to
read it, since a compressed document is unreadable.
On the whole, though, email attachments are not an appropriate
way of sending large documents. Other and more suitable
procedures exist, notably le transfer programs. If you genuinely
need to send large documents, then you should learn about le
transfer.
Here is a true story. Not long ago, a friend of mine went away for
a week. On his return, he was surprised to nd that his inbox
contained only four emails, instead of the two hundred or so he had
been expecting. But it didn’t take long to nd the explanation. Just
after his departure, somebody had sent him an email attached to
which was an entire Ph.D. thesis in uncompressed format. This
gigantic attachment had taken up all the storage space available on
his mailer, so that it could not accept any more mail, and all the
mail arriving during the rest of the week had been rejected by his
computer. Naturally, the sender had not bothered to check rst with
my friend as to whether he was willing to receive the thesis.
I hope it is obvious that the sender’s behaviour was monumentally
stupid and irresponsible. Make sure you are never guilty of such bad
behaviour.
My friend was lucky that the attachment didn’t freeze his mailer.
If you send somebody an attachment which is too big for his mailer
to store, his mailer may freeze and refuse to work at all. This is not
the way to make friends.
In some cases, rather than trying to send a large attachment, you
might be well advised to post the long document on the Web, and
then simply to mail the URL (address) of the document. If you can
do this, it makes life easy for everybody concerned. There are no
compatibility problems with web pages – again, as long as you
haven’t made use of any ashy software.
A very small document can often be incorporated into the body of
your email, so that you need not send an attachment at all. But, of
course, if you are converting a document from some other format
into the plaintext required for email, you must check the conversion
and edit it as much as required to make it easy to read.

6.5 VIRUSES
The destructive programs called viruses are distributed from
machine to machine by means of attachments to emails.
Consequently, experienced users of computers are very wary of
attachments. Many people and organizations simply refuse to open
any attachments from strangers, because of the risk of viruses. So, if
you need to send an attachment to someone you don’t know, it’s a
good idea to introduce yourself rst, to explain who you are and
what you’re up to. Once your recipients know you, then you can
consider sending them an attachment. As usual, though, you should
rst explain the purpose of your attachment and get permission to
send it.
For the same reason, it can be dangerous to forward (pass on)
attachments you have received from strangers. You should never
forward an attachment unless you are certain that it comes from a
safe source.

6.6 EMPTY MESSAGES

There is one blunder which is so horrendously stupid and o ensive,
and yet so frequent, that I have decided to give it a section to itself.
This is the empty message.
Almost once a week I open an email from a stranger and nd
myself staring at a blank window. What the malefactor has done is
to send me an empty message with an attachment. Apparently he
expects me to go to all the trouble of opening the attachment –
which may not be a simple task – and wading through it, merely in
order to nd out what the mail is about and whether I’m even
interested in reading it.
Well, if you’ve read the book this far, you can easily guess how I
respond. When I see that empty window, I instantly reach for the
Delete button. In half a second, that empty message is gone, and its
unopened attachment is gone with it. There is no way on earth I am
going to put up with such scandalously o ensive behaviour.
You must never send anyone an empty message. No matter how
wonderful your attachment is, you must provide a message
explaining what the attachment is about and why you are sending
it. And, of course, you must sign your message as usual: the idiots
who send empty messages invariably fail to sign them, as well.
Attachments to empty messages are even more likely to carry
viruses than other attachments, which is another reason for
recipients not to open them. In fact, an attachment to an empty
message is scarcely likely to be opened by anyone at all, apart
perhaps from a few thoughtless beginners.
If you have ever been guilty of sending an empty message, I hope
your ears are now burning with shame. In any case, don’t do it
again. The empty message is one of the most o ensive misuses of
email that I can conceive of.

6.7 AUDIO ATTACHMENTS

This is a rare problem, but I have known it to happen, so I guess
there must be a few people out there who need to have this point
explained to them. The point is simple: Do not attach sound e ects to
your email.
On an extremely rare occasion, it may be necessary or helpful to
attach a sound recording to a professional posting in a specialist
eld. Otherwise, audio attachments are entirely out of order. Of all
the things you can do to convince your recipients that you have a
mental age of nine, attaching sound e ects to your email is possibly
top of the list.

6.8 COPYRIGHT
There is no legal problem when you attach a document you have
created yourself. But you must not attach a document created by
somebody else without the owner’s permission. Doing so is a
violation of copyright, and it’s a quick way of getting yourself into
trouble. (See chapter 10.)

Chapter summary:

• Before sending an attachment, check with your recipients

• Use only the most basic software to construct attachments
• Keep your attachments short
• Never send an empty message
• Never attach sound e ects
 7
Asking Questions

One of the most frequent uses of email is asking questions.

Questions present some particular points of presentation and
protocol.

7.1 CHECK BEFORE YOU ASK

Here is a piece of good advice: don’t re o a question by email
until you have rst tried to nd the answer yourself.
Very commonly, I receive questions like this one:
What is the origin of the word ‘calico’?

As it happens, any decent desk dictionary of English will explain the

origins of English words. Reaching for the dictionary, nding the
word and reading the account of its origin will chew up perhaps
ninety seconds. You can’t even boot up your computer that fast, and
you may have to wait days for an answer to an email question.
Recently, a confused questioner emailed me wanting to know
when and where paper and printing were invented. I don’t know
why he picked me, since such matters are far from my areas of
competence. But the main point is that he had plainly made no
e ort to nd the answers for himself before ring o his questions.
Information like this can be found in any encyclopedia. Having a
computer on your desk does not cut you o from the world of
printed books, and it is both foolish and rude to try to get a stranger
to do the work which you could do for yourself in a couple of
minutes.
Moreover, even if you don’t have ready access to an encyclopedia,
you can certainly consult the Web. Before you send o your
question, spend a few minutes browsing the Web with your search
engine.
The Web is anything but well organized, and there is no
guarantee that the answer to any particular question can be found
there. But the volume and variety of the information which is now
available is truly astonishing.
Not long ago, I became curious about the origin of the name of
that most quaintly named insect, the confused our beetle. I reached
for my search engine, and within a few seconds I found myself
reading a detailed account of how the bug acquired its amusing
name.
And recently I decided to investigate the humble kitchen blender.
When I was a child, I was told by somebody that the blender had
been invented by an American bandleader named Fred Waring. My
attempts at looking this topic up in reference books were failures, so
I turned to the Web. Again, it was only moments before I was
reading the whole story of Fred Waring and his revolutionary
machine.
The World Wide Web is a truly wonderful resource, and you
should certainly learn how to use it. Unfortunately, the skilful and
e cient use of search engines is a topic beyond the scope of this
book, and I won’t pursue the matter here.
But you will save yourself and other people a great deal of time if
you simply get into the habit of looking at obvious sources before
mailing questions. Consult the obvious reference books, and search
the Web. Only if you nd no joy in these searches should you then
feel free to ask an electronic question.
There is more. If you are sending your question to an electronic
service which deals in answering questions, there are two resources
which you must check before sending in a question: FAQs and
archives.
Many electronic resources maintain lists of FAQs, or Frequently
Asked Questions. So, before using a service, look to see if it has a set
of FAQs; if it has, then look at those FAQs to see if your question is
among them. You may be asking your question for the rst time, but
you may be the eighty-seventh person to ask that question, and
nobody will thank you for sending in a question to which the
answer is already posted in the list of FAQs.
Here are some examples of questions which the panellists on Ask-
a-Linguist get asked over and over and over again:
1. Is it wise to bring up my child bilingually?
2. Which is the oldest language?
3. What’s the di erence between a language and a dialect?
4. Which is the hardest language to learn?

(Just to make sure that you don’t turn up on our list with one of
these questions, here are the answers. (1)Yes; absolutely. (2) The
question is meaningless: all languages are equally ‘old’. (3) A dialect
is a variety of a language which also has other varieties; a language
is not a variety of anything larger than itself. (4) The language
which is most di erent from your own.)
The other thing you should check for is archives. Some electronic
resources maintain archives, which are les containing all the
messages that have been received there. If archives exist, they will
normally be accompanied by some device for searching them
quickly and e ciently for particular topics. Again, it is good
behaviour to search the archives before sending in a question, since
the answer to your question might already be sitting there.
All of these things are good practice, and they are habits which
you must cultivate if you want to be a responsible adult. Check the
reference books; check the Web; check the FAQs; check the archives.
Then you can send your question – not before. Firing o a question
without doing these things is irresponsible and childish.
7.2 DECIDING WHO TO ASK
Once you have decided that you would like to ask a question by
email, who should you ask? If you are lucky enough to nd an
electronic answering service in the right area, such as Ask-a-Linguist
for languages and linguistics, then this issue is not a problem. But
you may not be so lucky. What then?
A common approach here is to trawl the Web, looking for web
pages devoted to the general area of the intended question. Suppose
you are dying to ask a question about gender roles in small children.
So, you put your search engine to work, and, after a while, you
stumble across a web page which has some interesting things to say
about this very subject. The page is owned by a certain Dr Alice
Bloom in Canada. It seems clear that Dr Bloom knows a great deal
about this subject, and therefore that she is a good bet to be able to
answer your question. Should you therefore send her your question?
Well, look again at her web page. Does Dr Bloom invite readers to
mail her with questions in her eld? If so, there should be no
problem in sending her your question. If this is not the case, does
she at least provide a link to her email on her web page? If she does,
then she is tacitly inviting you to mail her, so you can go ahead with
con dence.
But suppose you nd no such encouragement. Well, you can’t
mail her at all without her address, but perhaps a little more
trawling of the Web will turn up her email address on another site –
maybe her university’s home page. Now what?
Now it gets tricky. Dr Bloom is clearly somebody who will
probably be able to answer your question, but she has so far given
you no particular reason to believe that she welcomes questions
from strangers out of the blue. Should you go ahead anyway?
There is no easy answer to this. But, if you want to ask your
question, you don’t have much choice, so you may as well go ahead
and ask. But listen.
Approaching a total stranger for help out of the blue is an
imposition. You are asking someone you have never met to devote
time and e ort to helping you. And it is a safe bet that Dr Bloom is a
busy woman with little time to spare for strangers: she does not
spend her afternoons yawning at her desk, hoping that someone will
brighten up her empty day with an email.
Now, most people are courteous, and most people will try to help,
especially with questions within their specialist elds, about which
they are undoubtedly enthusiastic. In principle, therefore, Dr Bloom
will probably be happy to tell you a little something about her
favourite subject.
But you must take the greatest care in approaching a stranger for
help. You must demonstrate that you deserve help. First, you should
brie y apologize for approaching her at all. Second, you should
brie y explain who you are and why you are asking your question.
Third, you must make every e ort to write a question which is as
clear as you can make it, and you must put your question into the
very best standard English you can muster. Of course, you should
take such care with every serious email you send, but you should be
especially careful when you approach a stranger. Here is a suggested
version of the question:
[subject line] Q: Gender roles complete by age two?

Dear Dr Bloom,

Forgive me for approaching you out of the blue, but you are my best hope for
answering a question that is bothering me. I will shortly be starting a university degree
in social psychology, and I have a particular interest in gender issues.

An article in a popular magazine assures me that children in western countries have

been steered into their adult gender roles, completely and irreversibly, by the age of
two. Is this true? Can you suggest some serious and reliable reading on this subject?

Thank you in advance,

Christina Maddox

[email protected]
This is a good e ort, and it stands an excellent chance of eliciting a
friendly and helpful reply from Dr Bloom.
Just for comparison, here is a very bad attempt at asking the same
question:
[subject line] children

Do children acquire their gender roles by age two?

This version gets everything wrong. The subject line is useless; the
question here is abrupt and rude; there is no signature; and the
questioner is seemingly taking it for granted that she has a right to
demand an answer from Dr Bloom. Dr Bloom is unlikely to see it
that way. Even though she enjoys talking about her subject, she may
well decide that this anonymous question is too impolite to merit a
reply. And who would blame her?

7.3 SUBJECT LINES

When you are asking a question, there is a convention of marking
this fact in the subject line by typing ‘Q:’ at the beginning. Here is a
sample subject line for a question on raising children bilingually:
Q: Raising children bilingually

This lets your recipients know at once that you are asking a question
about the topic you have identi ed. As always, writing subject lines
that are as clear and explicit as possible makes life easier for the
people you are mailing.
However, this convention can be ignored in one context. When
you are sending a question to an electronic service which accepts
only questions, then it is obvious that you are asking a question, and
that ‘Q:’ can be omitted. So, for example, if you are sending your
question to Ask-a-Linguist, an electronic service which o ers to
answer questions on language and linguistics, you can just write the
following subject line:
Raising children bilingually

If in doubt, use the ‘Q:’ Nobody ever got shot for being overly
careful and thoughtful.
Now, we talked about writing good subject lines in chapter 3, but
the topic is worth returning to here. When you ask a question,
choose a subject line that identi es the nature of your question as
explicitly as possible. On Ask-a-Linguist, every one of the several
dozen queries we see each week is a question about some aspect of
language, and a subject line like Question or Language is completely
useless – yet quite a few questions arrive with precisely these futile
headings. Nor is it any better to ll the subject line with something
lame like Just wondering or Can you help me?
Suppose you are asking a question about the Spanish subjunctive.
Then, of course, your subject line should probably read Spanish
subjunctive. To me, this seems blindingly obvious, but it is amazing
how many people try to get by with something unhelpful like
Spanish, or with something even worse. Likewise, if you are asking
a question – not on Ask-a-Linguist, I hope – about recent suggestions
of a tenth planet in our solar system, then something like A tenth
planet? will probably serve your purposes admirably, while a feeble
e ort like Planets or New discoveries is of no use to any reader.
No member of the Ask-a-Linguist panel can hope to answer every
question that arrives, and I appreciate it when the subject line tells
me at once whether this is a question I can probably answer or not.
If I see a subject like Technical terms in Urdu or The language of
Eliot’s poetry, then I know at once that I can’t say anything helpful,
so I can leave that question to my colleagues, and pass on to the
questions I can answer.
If you use email to ask questions – or even if you don’t – learn to
provide subject lines which are as clear and explicit as they can
possibly be. Feeble or useless subject lines only make life a little
more di cult for the people you are mailing.
Here is a little practice. Suppose you are sending each of the three
questions below. What subject line would you attach to each?
1. I once read that the game of baseball is mentioned by Jane Austen in one of her
novels. Is this true? If so, where can I nd the reference?

2. Everybody knows that America is named after Amerigo Vespucci. But I’ve read
con icting accounts of Vespucci’s achievements. Some accounts dismiss him as a
charlatan who embroidered his insigni cant voyages, while others credit him with
important discoveries. Is there a de nitive view?

3. A popular book I’m reading claims that the Amazon once owed westward into the
Paci c, but that the rise of the Andes blocked the river and forced it to ow the other
way, into the Atlantic. Is this true? If so, where can I nd a serious scienti c account
of the matter?

Ponder these questions a moment, and then decide what subject

lines you would provide. I trust that you are wise enough by now to
refrain from feeble e orts like Baseball and Vespucci and Amazon,
not to mention pathetic e orts like America or Question or Can you
help? Have you made up your mind? All right; here are my
suggestions: (1) Q: Baseball in Jane Austen; (2) Q: Amerigo
Vespucci’s real achievements; (3) Q: Has the Amazon been turned
round?
How did you do? Are your suggestions explicit and to the point?
Can a stranger reading your subject line tell at once what you are
asking about?
(In case your curiosity is getting the better of you, here are the
answers. (1) Yes; the game of ‘base ball’ is mentioned by Jane
Austen in Northanger Abbey. This is thought to be the rst published
mention of the game. (2) The jury is still out on Vespucci. For a long
time, he was generally regarded as a liar, but historians seem to be
gradually coming round to the view that many of his stories were
true. (3) Yes; the Amazon owed into the Paci c until the rise of the
Andes, about 15 million years ago, blocked its ow. The river
turned into a gigantic freshwater lake until it nally broke through
to the Atlantic, about 10 million years ago. You can nd accounts of
these events on a number of websites.
By the way, nding those sites on the Amazon will provide an
excellent test of your skill in using a search engine. Any attempt to
type in ‘amazon’ plus anything else at all will typically return a huge
number of hits on the giant Internet bookseller Amazon.com, and
you will need to be resourceful to nd a way of removing these
unwanted hits, so that you can get to the sites you are looking for.)

7.4 WRITING GOOD QUESTIONS

Quite a few of the questions that reach my inbox are so poorly
written that I honestly cannot understand what the questioner is
trying to nd out. Here is a genuine example, slightly adapted:
In gender communictaion there is a pattern of dominance. Are there any studies that
show these patterns?

Well, to start with, you can see that this questioner has not even
bothered to read her own question. If she had read it, she would
have spotted and corrected the obvious typo, and she might also
have done something about the clash between the singular form a
pattern in the rst sentence and the suddenly plural form these
patterns in the second. But there are far more serious problems.
What on earth is gender communication? These words are
completely meaningless. No doubt the questioner has something in
mind, but she hasn’t made the slightest e ort to explain what that
is, and so I am helpless. I might hazard the wild guess that she
means ‘conversations between men and women’, but my guess
might be miles from what she is trying to talk about. Anyway, it
doesn’t matter whether my guess is right or wrong, because now the
questioner has another obstacle for me.
 What does she mean by a pattern of dominance?. This wording is
so vague that it might mean almost anything. Who or what is
supposed to be dominating who or what? The questioner gives me
no clue, and again I am helpless.
Finally, there is yet another obscurity. In her rst sentence, the
questioner asserts atly that this dominance, whatever it is, exists.
Apparently the reality of this dominance is an established fact, one
whose reality is beyond discussion. But then, in her second sentence,
she seems to be asking whether there exists any evidence for the
reality of such dominance! So, she rst asserts that this dominance
exists, and then asks if there is any evidence that it exists. What on
earth is she playing at? And what in the name of sanity is she trying
to nd out?
Questions like this one are all too common. They turn up because
so many questioners simply cannot be bothered to spend a little
time in thinking carefully about what they are trying to nd out and
in composing clear and explicit questions.
The questioner who sent in the question above had clearly just
dashed it o and sent it in, without editing it and without even
thinking about it. The result is an incomprehensible question which
will receive no useful answers, and in fact no answers at all beyond
perhaps ‘What are you talking about?’
Now, I still don’t know what this questioner is asking about. But
I’ll make a guess, and compose a question that asks more
successfully about my guess:
I have read that, in conversations between men and women, the male speakers
regularly dominate the conversations in some conspicuous manner. Are there any
studies which con rm this assertion, and which identify the nature of this male
dominance?

Now, at least this is a clear and explicit question. No reader will

have any trouble understanding what is being asked here, and any
reader who knows about the subject will be able to provide an
informative reply. But is this what the original questioner was
asking about? I still don’t know.
Here is another genuine example, again slightly adapted:
Would like the word ‘Roys’ translated into Welsh Gaelic

There is more sloppiness here: the questioner has not even bothered
to write a complete sentence. But again there are more serious
problems.
What in heaven’s name is the word Roys? The only Roy in English
is the male given name, as in Roy Rogers – but such names don’t
normally have plural forms. Moreover, names don’t usually have
translations: the name Bill Clinton is still Bill Clinton in Italian or
Polish.
So, again I am entirely at a loss to know what the questioner is
trying to nd out. His question makes no sense at all, and this time I
can’t even come up with a wild guess.
Just to put the icing on the cake, there is no such language as
Welsh Gaelic. Perhaps the questioner has Welsh in mind, or perhaps
Gaelic, or perhaps something else altogether. Perhaps he himself has
no idea what he is talking about. Who knows? How can anyone tell?
Once again, the questioner’s failure to devote a few minutes to the
business of constructing a careful and explicit question has resulted
in an incomprehensible mess that will receive no answer. And what
is the point of ring o a question which nobody can understand?
Do you begin to see why haste in composing emails is a bad idea,
and why careful planning and writing is essential?
Can you face one more of these? Here’s another genuine example,
just as it arrived in my inbox:
I recently noticed the Pyramid oor in Memphis labled with the words The Pyramid’.
This seems to be an inapproprate use of the article ‘the’ since it is apparently labling
the object. Is this proper or should it more appropriately be labled just Pyramid or
Pyramid Arena?
I must have read this a dozen times now, and I still have not the
faintest idea what this questioner is asking. And this time the text is
so far from intelligible that I can’t even pick out the problems with
any con dence. But I’ll try.
What do you suppose the Pyramid oor in Memphis might be? Are
we talking about Memphis, Tennessee, or about Memphis, Egypt?
The questioner fails to say. The word pyramid suggests Egypt, but
Pyramid Arena sounds more like a night spot in Tennessee – and
there are no pyramids in Memphis, Egypt. The questioner seems to
be taking it for granted that everybody in the world is intimately
acquainted with the pleasure spots of Memphis, Tennessee, or with
the archaeological sites of Memphis, Egypt – but I’ve never set foot
in either place. What do you suppose the phrase the object is meant
to denote? I certainly can’t guess. And it certainly doesn’t help that
the questioner tosses the hapless little pronoun it around in
promiscuous fashion, applying it rst to the word the(I think,
anyway) and then to the mysterious building (well, I think it’s a
building, though the questioner has not bothered to say so).
Bear in mind that the people who sent in these messages were not
simply idlers trying to waste everybody’s time. They had genuine
questions in their minds, and they genuinely wanted their questions
answered. And they genuinely thought that they had asked
questions which the people at the other end would easily be able to
answer. But their abject failure to expend the necessary time and
e ort in framing their questions with su cient care has led to
disaster in all cases. And I can assure you that I receive equally
incomprehensible questions almost every week.
People working in other circumstances report other kinds of
useless requests. The email commentator Kaitlin Duck Sherwood,
who used to work in a university, reports that she was forever
receiving requests like this one:
Please send me information about your university.
As she remarks acidly, this kind of mail gives her no clue at all
about what is wanted. List of degrees o ered? Application
deadlines? Number of students? Number of buildings? History? Is
she being asked for paper documents or for the university’s URL?
Who knows?
If you can’t write a better email than this one, there is hardly any
point in trying to write an email at all. You are simply wasting
everybody’s time.

7.5 PROVIDING A CONTEXT

A common failing in asking electronic questions is the absence of a
context. When you are framing your question, you know exactly the
context in which your question has arisen. But the people at the
other end don’t know anything about that context if you don’t tell
them, and this can make life very di cult for them.
Here is a bad example which is quite typical of many of the
questions I receive:
What is the meaning of the term ‘speci ed reference?

Well, I don’t know. This is not a standard term in my eld, and I

can’t nd it in any of the specialist dictionaries on my shelf.
What has happened? Well, I can surmise as follows. The
questioner is reading a particular book by a particular writer, and
that book uses the term I am being asked about. The questioner has
foolishly jumped to the conclusion that this is a term which is
universally known and used in linguistics, and so he has failed to
provide any context. Bad move, since my colleagues and I now have
practically no chance of coming up with a useful answer.
Here is an illustration of what the questioner should have written:
I am reading P. W. Frobisher’s book _Words Into Words_, which deals with the theory
and practice of translation. In several places, the author uses the term ‘speci ed
reference’ without explaining it. Here is a typical example, from page 97: ‘Here the
 rendering of French “la paix” with the bare English “peace” would lose the speci ed
reference of the original.’ Can you explain the meaning of this term?

This e ort is very much better. There is still no guarantee that we

can provide a good answer, but at least now we understand the
question, and so we have a chance of saying something helpful.
This shortcoming is really very frequent in questions about terms.
Unless you are certain that the term you are asking about is
universally used among the people you are mailing, you should be
careful to provide as much context as you can.
But the same problem can arise in other kinds of questions. Here
is a genuine question which I received a few days ago:
Do women speak faster than men?

Does this question look straightforward? Well, it’s not. Which

women? In which society? In which social group? In what contexts?
The questioner appears to be taking it for granted that the answer
must be a plain ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for all the women in the world, in all
languages, on all occasions. But the world is not so simple. Unless
the questioner wants to receive an essay on sex di erences in speech
all across the world – which nobody is going to provide anyway –
she should narrow down her question to the cases she is interested
in:
Is there any evidence that women in the English-speaking countries typically speak
faster than men? Does the answer appear to vary with social class or context or with
other variables?

This version is more focused and more professional, and it is more

likely to attract some informative replies.
The next time someone tells you that careful composition and
editing are out of place with emails, you can smile quietly to
yourself and dismiss your would-be adviser as a fool.
7.6 MULTIPLE QUESTIONS
As a general rule, you should ask only one question in a single
message. It is permissible to ask two, or at most three, closely
related questions at one time, but no more. So, something like this is
acceptable:
What is the origin of the name ‘Eskimo’? Why is this name now widely regarded as
o ensive? And what are the di erences among the words ‘Inuit’, ‘Inuktitut’ and
‘Yupik’?

These are closely related questions on a single topic, and grouping

them like this will perturb nobody. But this is enough for one email.
You must avoid the kind of excess illustrated by my next example,
which is very similar to several real questions I have received; the
mysterious terms are technical terms in my eld of linguistics:
Can you tell me the meanings of the words ‘phone’, ‘phoneme’, ‘allophone’, ‘morph’,
‘morpheme’, ‘allomorph’, ‘alternant’, ‘cranberry morpheme’, ‘portmanteau morph’,
‘zero morph’, ‘phrase’, ‘clause’, ‘main clause’, ‘subordinate clause’, ‘complement clause’
and ‘matrix clause’?

This deluded questioner does not appear to understand the

di erence between a human being and a dictionary. In any case, he
is being wholly unreasonable. Asking for the de nition of one term
is ne, but asking about every term you’ve run into this week is
intolerable. A question of this kind will receive no reply except this
one: ‘Go and look in a dictionary.’
It gets worse. Some time ago, I had occasion to answer a question
from a high-school student. Seemingly delighted with my answer, he
then came back to me with a list of almost forty questions, which he
had obviously just dreamed up while staring at his computer screen.
Apparently he was under the impression that I have nothing better
to do all day than to sit in front of my computer and laboriously
answer long strings of dumb questions from dozy high-school
students. Naturally, I didn’t even bother to reply.
7.7 DEMANDING A QUICK REPLY
One of the most o ensive things you can do, when asking a question
– or in any email at all – is to demand a rapid reply. It always
amazes me how many emails arrive in my inbox with a nal
sentence like Please reply to me quickly or I need an answer right
away.
Remember – the people you are mailing are busy. They are
courteous, and they will reply to you as soon as they reasonably
can. Demanding a quick response will not get you an answer any
sooner, and in fact it may have the opposite e ect. Some readers
may bridle at your rudeness in demanding a fast answer, and decide
that your behaviour does not deserve a reply at all.
Don’t ask for a rapid response. If you need the information right
away, that’s your problem. Anyway, have you already checked the
obvious reference books? And have you searched the Web? No?
Why not?

7.8 HOMEWORK
Students in schools and universities are often tempted to use email
questions to get answers to their homework. This is potentially
dangerous.
Your teacher or your course tutor will probably be pleased if you
search the Web in order to nd the information that you need to
complete an assignment. But asking other people to do your work
for you is a very di erent matter.
If you are thinking of doing this, you must rst obtain your
teacher’s permission. This permission may not be granted, since
your teacher may consider it improper for you simply to ask
someone else to do your work for you.
If you do get permission, then you must make it clear in your
question that you are seeking help with an assignment. Don’t be
coy: spell it out. Explain that you are asking for help with your
homework, and explain that your teacher has given you permission
to do this.
Finally, if you get any useful answers, make sure that you
acknowledge the assistance you have received, expressly and fully,
when you hand in your work.
You must do these things. Failure to do them is dishonest. To be
blunt, you are cheating if you are not completely open and honest
with all concerned about what you are doing.
There is another point to be considered. You know by now that I
am on the panel of Ask-a-Linguist. Several years ago, I was startled
to see a question arrive which was exactly one of the questions
which I had just set my rst-year students for homework – and the
name at the end of the question was that of one of my students.
Well, of course I gave him a ea in his ear. And then I pointed out
to him that, if he had done the assigned reading in the textbook, he
would have found the answer he was looking for.
Asking someone else to do your work for you is cheating, even
when you ask electronically. Don’t do it.
There is one circumstance in which it is legitimate to approach
strangers for help with your homework. Assuming your teacher has
given you permission to do this, it is ne to approach strangers and
to ask them to recommend work which you can consult. So, it is
acceptable to approach me with an email like this one:
I’m writing an essay on the di erences between human language and animal
communication. Can you recommend any useful reading on this subject?

But it is completely out of order, when you are writing this essay, to
mail me in this fashion:
What are the principal di erences between human language and animal
communication?

Now you are asking me to do your work for you. And that is wrong.
 I can’t resist quoting one more question which arrived recently at
Ask-a-Linguist:
I am in my third year of a linguistics degree and must come up with a title for a 6000
word essay. I was wondering if anyone had any interesting ideas for a possible topic?

I think it is safe to say that requests of this kind are frowned upon. It
might have been acceptable if the questioner had named a speci c
area, such as rst-language acquisition or the grammar of Spanish,
and asked for suggestions within that limited domain. But asking for
titles on any subject at all is absurd.

7.9 IDENTIFYING YOUR COUNTRY

Many of the questions I get asked by email can only be sensibly
answered if I know what country the questioner lives in. Consider
questions like these, both of which are similar to many of the
questions I see:
At which universities can I study Sanskrit? Where can I nd an importer which
imports Spanish liqueurs?

Now, is the rst questioner really interested in hearing about

degrees in Sanskrit o ered by universities in Australia or Sweden? It
is certainly possible to study Sanskrit in India, but is a questioner
who lives in Liverpool or Chicago likely to be eager to travel to
India to do a university degree?
Likewise, if the second questioner lives in Sydney or Las Vegas, is
she probably dying to nd out about importers in South Africa or in
Japan?
You see the point. Questions like these are impossible to answer if
the questioners fail to identify their countries – but in fact most
questioners fail to do this. I’m not sure whether they are just
thoughtless, or whether they dozily believe that theirs is the only
country in the world which is connected to the Internet.
 So, when you ask a question, look at it carefully and decide
whether you need to identify your country. Don’t assume that the
name of your country is obvious. Some email addresses carry two-
letter country codes, like.uk for Britain and.ca for Canada, but most
addresses lack these codes, and carry instead only something wholly
uninformative like.com or.net. Anyway, not all users will realize
that.de is Germany, or that.my is Malaysia.

7.10 THANK-YOU MESSAGES

If you ask a question, and somebody mails you an answer, it is
common courtesy to thank the respondent. Nothing fancy is called
for: just a plain ‘Thank you’ will do. As always, email is not
disconnected from the rest of the world, and what is courteous and
proper in dealing with people in other contexts remains courteous
and proper in electronic contexts.
Oh, and leave it at that. It might be acceptable to return to your
respondent with one follow-up question, but no more. Don’t do
what some people do, and try to treat the respondent as your
permanent source of information.

Chapter summary:

• Check other resources before asking a question

• Provide an informative subject line, preceded by ‘Q:’
• Frame your question carefully and thoughtfully
• Provide a good context for your question
• Avoid multiple questions
• Don’t demand a quick reply
• Don’t ask somebody to do your homework for you
• Identify your country when this matters
• Thank your respondents
 8
Replying and Forwarding

8.1 HEADERS
When you receive an email, you should nd that the body of the
text is preceded by a series of lines of information. These lines are
called the header. The header tells you who sent the message, who
it was sent to, and when it was sent. As a rule, it also carries the full
subject line provided by the sender, no matter how long that subject
line is. So, a typical header looks like this:
Sent: 18 August 2004, 15.34
From: Andrew Holt <[email protected]>
To: Cynthia Drummond <Cynthia.Drummond@jdg.
co.uk>
Subject: Alterations to our winter catalogue

You can see the value of the header. It provides a great deal of
valuable information in a small space. Among other things, the
sender’s name and email address are spelled out here. This
information may not be easy to recover from any other source.
Moreover, if you print a copy of the mail, the header will be printed
as well. This is important, because the subject line and any other
lines which stand above the body of the message often fail to print.
There is one common variation here. Many mailers, instead of
repeating the header of the original message, will delete that header
and replace it with a line like this one:
On 18 August 2004 Andrew Holt <a.holt@shockley. co.uk> wrote:

This arrangement is substantially less informative than the rst one,

but it is very common. If your mailer o ers you a choice, you are
advised to prefer the rst style.

Unfortunately, some mailers have the very bad habit of stripping

(deleting) the header altogether. This is bad, because such stripping
removes information which you may not be able to nd anywhere
else. Recall from chapter 2 that I advised you strongly to put your
full name and your email address at the end of every email. Doing
so ensures that this vital information will be present in your email,
even if your recipient’s mailer strips the header.

8.2 DECIDING WHETHER TO REPLY

Suppose you receive an email that seems to call for a reply. The
need for a reply may be obvious if the other person has carefully
inserted the notation ‘Q:’ (for ‘question’) or ‘Req:’ (for ‘request’) into
the subject line of the mail you are looking at, but, even without
such overt markings, you may decide that a response is appropriate.
Before you begin typing a reply, you should rst check the rest of
your mail. There is always the possibility that the other person has
sent you a second message saying ‘Forget it!’, in which case you will
be wasting your time in composing a reply. Second, the sender may
have discovered a blunder in the original message and therefore
sent a corrected version, which is the one you are now meant to
reply to. Third, if the original message was sent to several people,
and not just to you personally, it may be that someone else has
already sent the same reply that you were about to send. Checking
your mail before replying can save you a couple of pointless
messages a week.
If the message appears to be outstandingly important, but you
don’t have the time to reply to it right away, you might consider
sending a brief response just to con rm that you have received it
and to assure the sender that you will deal with it as quickly as you
can.
 One last point. This is probably not something that you will often
need to worry about. However, every once in a while, you may nd
a forged message or a spoof message in your inbox. Such a message
will carry the name of someone who is more or less familiar to you,
or else the name of someone who appears to be in a position of
authority. The object will be to make a fool of you by eliciting an
innocent response to the phony message.

In most cases, you can spot the fake merely by exercising a little
judgement and common sense. If the message appears to be
completely out of character for the person whose name it carries, or
if it appears to be outstandingly unreasonable in content, then you
are probably looking at a forged message, and you should simply
ignore it, or, if it appears disturbing, report it to your system
administrator.

8.3 THE MECHANICS OF REPLYING

In most cases, you will reply to a message by clicking on the Reply
button on your mailer. When you do this, several things will
normally happen. First, a new window will pop up on your screen,
ready for you to type your reply into. (But see below for a possible
variation here.) Second, one or more email addresses will be
automatically inserted into the address line. Third, if there were any
ccs in the original message, these will be repeated on your cc line.
Fourth, the subject line of the original message will be copied into
your subject line, but preceded by the word ‘Re:’, which means
‘concerning’. Fifth, the text of the original message, including its
header, will appear in the window, with each line preceded by a
special character, usually the right angle bracket, >. Finally, your
ordinary signature – assuming you have constructed one – will
appear as well. Let’s talk about these things.
The window needs no discussion, but the address line does. The
rst thing you should do is to check the address line to see who
your reply is going to go to (so far). If the original message was sent
to several people, then quite possibly the addresses of all these
people will appear. Do you really want to send your reply to all of
them? If so, ne; but, if not, you must carefully delete the addresses
you don’t want. Doing this is important: it is highly inconsiderate to
ll people’s inboxes with messages that are of no interest to them.
At my university, it occasionally happens that a routine question
from the administration building is sent to fty or two hundred of
the academic sta . I will amuse no one if I send my reply to all fty
or two hundred of my colleagues when no one but the questioner
has any interest in my answer.
The same goes with the cc line. Any addresses listed here should
likewise be deleted unless you decide that you really do need to
send your reply to these people.
However, some mailers work slightly di erently. On these
mailers, when you click on the Reply button, you don’t immediately
get a reply window. Instead, you get a little window containing a
list of all the addresses to which your reply will be addressed or
cced. If you’re not satis ed with this list, you can edit it by clicking
on the addresses with your mouse. Once you are happy, you click on
‘OK’ or ‘Done’, and then you will get the reply window, just as I have
described it.
Most mailers have a Reply All button as well as a Reply button. If
you click on Reply All, you will probably discover that your reply is
being sent to every address the mailer can nd in the original
message. Use this option with care.
Now to the subject line. Whatever the original subject line was, it
should be copied automatically onto the subject line of your reply,
but preceded by the word Re:, which is universally understood as
marking a reply to an earlier message. So, if the subject line of the
original message was Next Tuesday’s meeting, then the subject line
of your reply will read Re: Next Tuesday’s meeting.
If this ‘Re:’ fails to appear, then something may be wrong with the
settings of your mailer program, and you should check the settings
for outgoing mail, which you will probably nd under preferences.
Meanwhile, I’m afraid you must add the ‘Re:’ by hand, since its
presence is essential.
It is this ever-present ‘Re:’ that identi es genuine replies in the
inboxes of your recipients. And this is why any email with the
subject line Reply to your query can be identi ed instantly as a
piece of dishonest junk mail and deleted without the trouble of
opening it. No genuine reply ever has such a subject line.
If the message you are replying to already contains this element
‘Re:’, then your reply should not add a second instance of it. So, if
you are replying to a message with the subject line Re: Next
Tuesday’s meeting, then the subject line of your reply should still be
displayed as Re: Next Tuesday’s meeting. This should happen
automatically. If instead your mailer should come up with Re: Re:
Next Tuesday’s meeting, then you should carefully delete one
instance of that ‘Re:’. Otherwise, after a few messages back and
forth, you will all be looking at a subject line which runs Re: Re: Re:
Re: Re:, and so on. This is a rare problem, but I have known it to
happen.
In the window created for your reply, you will see the entire text
of the message you are replying to, including its header. Every line
of this text should be preceded by a special marker. In practice, the
marker which is used almost universally is the right angle bracket,
>. So, suppose the original message was this:
Sent: 14 March 2004
From: Angela Thome <[email protected]>
To: Richard Briscoe <[email protected]>
Subject: Chinese rights to your textbook

Richard,

We have received a request from a publisher in the People’s Republic of China to

publish a Chinese translation of your textbook in China. The royalties will be modest,
but think of the fame! Are you happy to agree to this? If so, I’ll post you details of the
agreement.

Best, Angela
 Angela Thorne
Commissioning Editor
Albatross Publishers
602 Old Market Street
London EC4 9JY

This will appear in your reply window as follows:

> Sent: 14 March 2004
> From: Angela Thorne <[email protected]>
> To: Richard Briscoe <[email protected]>
> Subject: Chinese rights to your textbook
>
> Richard,
>
> We have received a request from a publisher in the
> People’s Republic of China to publish a Chinese
> translation of your textbook in China. The royalties
> will be modest, but think of the fame! Are you happy to
> agree to this? If so, I’ll post you details of the
> agreement.
>
> Best, Angela
> Angela Thorne
> Commissioning Editor
> Albatross Publishers
> 602 Old Market Street
> London EC4 9JY

Again, if the angle brackets fail to appear, then you should check
the settings for outgoing mail on your mailer. Those brackets are
important. As we will see later, they are of crucial value in
distinguishing the words of the original message from the words of
your reply. Without the brackets, your readers may become
hopelessly confused as to what belongs to the original message and
what belongs to the reply.
I am told that a few mailers fail to provide those crucial brackets.
If your mailer fails to provide them, this is an excellent reason for
buying a new mailer.
If the message you are replying to already contains a passage
marked o by angle brackets, then your reply will add a second
layer of brackets, and each line of that passage will be set o by two
angle brackets, ». This goes on for ever, with each new reply adding
another layer of angle brackets. After a while, these brackets will
make the lines too long to t into a mailer window, and the result
may be almost unreadable. Try to avoid this fate by not quoting
things without limit.
Your signature will be attached to your reply, just as you have
constructed it. But there is one possible problem here. If you are
thinking of quoting part of the message in your reply, then you
really want your signature to appear at the end of your reply, after
the quoted text set o in angle brackets. This way, your reply will
consist of the quoted part of the original, followed by your words of
response, followed nally by your signature. But some mailers insist
on putting your signature at the top of the reply window, before the
quoted text. If your mailer does this, and you can’t set the mailer to
put your signature at the end, then you will have to use the cut-and-
paste feature to move your signature to the end whenever you want
to quote from the original text in your reply. If you often want to
quote from the original message, this constant cutting-and-pasting is
a aming nuisance, and it might justify buying a new mailer.

8.4 EXPLAINING WHAT YOU’RE REPLYING TO

It is crucial to make it completely clear just what it is you’re
replying to. Nobody wants to open a mail from you and read
something like Yes or I’m afraid I can’t do it or Has Angela agreed to
this?, staring out of an otherwise blank window. Even with a good
subject line – which the original sender may have failed to provide –
such a message may be wholly unintelligible. You can’t safely
assume that the sender knows instantly just which of possibly many
emails you are replying to, or that he recalls every word of that
email.
At the very least, then, you will need either to provide a few
words of explanation as to what you are replying to or to quote a
couple of lines from the original message. If the original message
was very short – no more than about six lines – then you can quote
it in full.
But don’t quote the original message pointlessly. We come now to
one of the central skills of emailing: you must delete all unwanted
material. It is dreadful practice to include in your reply the entire
text of the message you are replying to when that text serves no
function. Nobody wants to open an email and stare at two hundred
lines quoted from an earlier mail, with your three-line reply tacked
on somewhere. Anybody who has to wade through this kind of mess
is going to become very annoyed, and some people may just give
up.
It is a ghastly experience to watch an exchange between two
people who have never learned to delete the text they are replying
to. After a couple of messages in each direction, the entire
correspondence is strung out at length at the end of every new
email. Such a collection is a ridiculous waste of storage space and
money. Don’t let this happen to you. Learn to delete.
You may think you are avoiding the problem by putting your
reply at the beginning, with the entire original message trailing after
it. But this is bad practice for another reason. Placing your reply
before the words you are replying to is called ‘top-posting’, and top-
posting can be very annoying. Look at the bad example below.
There is something to be said for all three options, but on balance I am convinced that
the second option will be the least costly.

> We will soon have to make a decision about providing

 > technical support for our computing facilities. As you
> know, our budget is limited, and good technical sta
> don’t grow on trees. The Working Party has been
> investigating the possibilities, and it has identi ed
> three priorities in terms of which our nal decision
> should be… [goes on for some time]

This reply has been provided in a vacuum, and any recipient who
has not memorized the original message will be ba ed by it. That
hapless recipient will now have to wade through the original
message to nd out what the rst three lines mean.
Avoid top-posting. It will earn you no friends. The proper way of
replying to a long message is explained in the next section.

8.5 QUOTING FROM THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE

Sometimes the message you are replying to consists of several

points, one after another, and you may nd it necessary to respond
to each point in turn. In this case, it is best to quote one point at a
time, and to add your response after that quotation, before moving
on to the next point. As a result, your reply will consist of
alternating passages, one quoted passage set o by angle brackets,
and then one passage written by you in response.
If you nd that you don’t need to respond to some part of the
original, then don’t waste space by quoting that part: delete it, and
insert the word [snip] to show that material has been deleted. If you
nd that you can usefully delete a short sequence from the middle
of a passage, then delete it and insert […] to show that a short piece
of text has been deleted.
While you are doing all these things, be careful to ensure that
every line quoted from the original message is marked by an angle
bracket. Sometimes a few of the angle brackets get lost during
editing, and you must insert additional angle brackets by hand, in
order to keep the structure of your reply clear.
Let’s look at an example of this. Suppose you have received the
message below:
On 7 May 2004 Steve Baxter <s.v.baxter@cyclops. co.uk> wrote:

We’ve just heard from the head o ce about the new procedures for assessing
employees. They’ve put forward several proposals, and they’d like to have your
comments on them.

1. Each employee to be assessed every 12 months, instead

of every 18 months, as now.
2. Assessors to include immediate superior and two colleagues, instead of one
colleague, as now.
3. Assessees to provide a written account of their own achievements since the last
assessment.
Steve Baxter

Your reply might look like this:

> On 7 May 2004 Steve Baxter <s.v.baxter@cyclops. co.uk>
> wrote:

[snip]

[comments on new assessment proposals]

> 1. Each employee to be assessed every 12 months […]

Good from the company’s point of view, but it won’t be popular. Assessment is
unpleasant and time-consuming, and there will be resistance to making it more
frequent.

> 2. Assessors to include immediate superior and two

> colleagues […]
 A good idea, and most people will like being assessed by two colleagues, but it will
double the amount of work for everybody – another reason not to make assessment
more frequent.

> 3 Assessees to provide a written account of their own

> achievements since the last assessment.

This idea will be very popular with high yers. Weaker people will hate it. Is this what
the company wants?

Madeleine Stephenson
[email protected]

Observe how clearly the structure of the reply emerges from the
screen (represented here by the page). If the writer had instead
quoted the entire original message, followed by her entire response,
then the result would be much harder to follow. And note also how
useful those angle brackets are in setting o portions of the original
message. Without the brackets, the structure of the response would
be much less visible.
Another point to notice is that the writer has deleted as much of
the original message as she could without losing the essential
material. You should do the same. Quoting huge chunks of the
original message to no point is thoughtless and inconsiderate. As
always, an email should be as brief as it can be while getting its job
done e ectively, and a reply is no di erent in this respect from any
other mail.
Some commentators propose a rule of thumb: in any reply, at
least half the lines should be yours. This is a good notion to keep in
mind, but, of course, it doesn’t mean that a reply which is 50 per
cent quoted material is always a good idea.
Finally, observe that the respondent has added these words:
[comments on new assessment proposals]. Such brief words of
introduction are excellent practice. Instead of tediously quoting a
possibly long passage explaining the point of what follows, you can
simply delete that long passage and replace it with a few brisk
words of explanation. Your readers will thank you.

8.6 CLARITY AND EXPLICITNESS

A reply, like any piece of writing, should be framed carefully and
thoughtfully. A hasty and o hand reply may mislead or even ba e
the person you are replying to.
Suppose someone is replying to this message:
In line with our recent decision that every member of sta should create and maintain
a personal web page, we have arranged for our support sta to o er a course in HTML,
the markup language in which web pages are constructed. The course will be given
twice a week, on Wednesday afternoons and on Friday afternoons, beginning in the
week of 27 March and running for six weeks. No more than twelve people can be
accommodated on each day. Please let us know whether you need to enrol on the
course and which day you prefer. Please let us know also whether you use a Mac or a
PC.

And suppose this is the reply:

Yes; I’d like to do it, and I use a Mac.

This hasty response has failed to answer one of the questions in the
rst message, and now there will have to be another time-
consuming exchange of messages in order to extract the missing
information. This has happened either because the respondent has
not read the message carefully enough or because he has dashed o
his reply with too little care.
Since you are no doubt reading this book carefully, you are
probably surprised to be told that anyone could reply to a message
in such an obviously inadequate manner. But in fact this sort of
thing happens all the time. People are busy; they read their mail
hastily; they make assumptions about the content of their mail; and
they construct their responses with far less care and attention than
is appropriate.
Of course, the original questioner could have constructed the rst
message more carefully, by enumerating the three questions being
asked. Doing this would have greatly reduced the likelihood of
careless and defective replies. But it is unrealistic to expect that
every email you receive will be impeccably composed, and you need
to learn to deal with real messages in the real world.
Consider another example:
We are contemplating the purchase of a new Photon photocopier to replace our
existing machine, which is seven years old and which has been breaking down with
distressing frequency. The Photon costs about £4,700, including VAT, a price which
will virtually exhaust our equipment budget for the year. Buying the copier will mean
that we can’t buy a scanner this year. The Photon o ers graded enlargement to 200%
and reduction to 50%; double-sided copying from both single- and double-sided
originals; copying on A4 or A3 paper; collating and optional stapling of multi-page
copies; and a basic copy rate of 80 copies per minute, about double that of our existing
machine. It is black-and-white only. Full speci cations are available in Jenny’s o ce.
We would like to have your views on this proposed purchase.

And a possible reply:

Well, the copier sounds nice, but I would really like to have that scanner, since I often
want to copy newspaper articles into my computer. I’ve been agonizing over this. On
the whole, it seems to me that it would be a good idea to buy it rst and to save the
other one for next year.

Are you con dent that you know what the respondent’s view is?
This little blizzard of vague pronominal items like it and the other
one leave it largely obscure as to just which machine the writer
thinks should be bought rst. He would have made everybody’s life
easier by choosing more explicit words. Perhaps he means this:
On the whole, it seems to me that it would be a good idea to buy the scanner rst and
to save the copier for next year.
As always, a few seconds of care and attention will pay large
dividends.

8.7 HANDING OUT ADVICE

Once you have read and understood everything in this book, you
will be a skilful user of email. Your emails will be competent and
professional, and they will make a good impression on everyone
who reads them. Excellent.
But, of course, there are lots of other people out there who are
still far from mastering even the elements of good email practice.
They provide useless subject lines, or no subject lines at all. They
write all in capital letters, or all in small letters. They fail to sign
their messages. Their mails are full of typos and mistakes in English,
and are hard to follow. They use foolish abbreviations and cute little
doodahs of every description. They demand instant responses, and
they give the impression that they regard you as a servant. In short,
they get everything wrong.
What should you do when you receive an email from one of these
people? Should you grit your teeth and respond to it as though it
were impeccable? Should you simply delete it in exasperation and
forget about it? Or should you o er the malefactor some friendly
advice?
There are no easy answers. Some experienced users of email have
no patience with amateurish fumblings, and they respond to
incompetent emails with blunt and sharply worded advice to learn
the ropes. Others decline to make any comments at all, for fear of
hurting someone’s feelings.
The problem with blunt criticism is that it can make enemies and
possibly discourage people from using email at all. And the problem
with the tolerant view is this: if nobody ever says anything, then the
bumblers will never learn that they are behaving badly, and they
will go on sending incompetent emails and annoying their recipients
for ever. We need to nd a middle ground.
 To begin with, some kinds of misbehaviour are so serious that
there is no point in even contemplating a reply at all: the only
sensible course is instant deletion. Among the candidates for this
treatment are at least the following:

• Writing in anything other than plaintext

• Sending an empty message with an attachment

Beyond this, I suggest that some sins are so serious that we have no
choice: the perpetrators must be warned about their behaviour.
Among these sins are at least the following:

• Sending a message to far too many people

• Leaving the subject line empty
• Writing all in capital letters or all in small letters
• Using text-messaging abbreviations like ‘R U’ for ‘are you’
• Demanding a response instead of requesting one
• Demanding a quick response
• Failing to proofread the message
• Failing to sign the message

I consider that these practices are worse than mere shortcomings:

they are o ensive and intolerable. If we are going to reply to such
messages at all, then we should not hesitate to point out the failings
to their perpetrators.
In most cases, of course, we should try to do this as politely as we
can. Many of these blunders, awful as they are, result merely from
well-meaning ignorance, or even from the corrosive in uence of
those people who go around advising beginners to keep their emails
‘informal’. But one or two of these practices, such as demanding a
rapid response, can result from nothing other than sheer crass
rudeness, and there is no reason not to say so.
 Delicate forms of words which may be useful here include ‘You
would make my life a little easier if…’, ‘It is considered courteous
to…’, and ‘You will make a better impression if you…’ If you can
see a way of framing your comments in such a delicate way, ne. If
you can’t, well, then you will have to make a judgement: is the
blunder serious enough that a blunt complaint is appropriate?

8.8 FORWARDING

If you receive an email from somebody, and you pass on a copy of

that mail to somebody else, then you are forwarding the original
message.
Now, in most circumstances, you must not forward mail without
the permission of the person who sent it to you. Forwarding mail
without permission is extremely discourteous, and it can earn you a
good deal of ill will. It is also a violation of copyright, which means
that it can get you into trouble (see chapter 10). So, if you think you
have a reason to forward an email, then you should get in touch
with the sender, explain who you want to forward the mail to and
why, and ask for permission.
If you receive permission, then you can go ahead. Your mailer
probably has a Forward button, and, if you click on this button
while you are looking at the original message, a new window will
pop up. The address line of the new window will be empty, waiting
for you to type in the address to which you want to forward the
mail. The subject line will duplicate the original subject line, but the
word forward or the abbreviation fwd will probably be added. The
complete text of the original message, including header and
signature, will appear in the window, probably marked o by angle
brackets, just as in a reply.
At the beginning of the message which you are about to forward,
you should type in a brief explanation of where the message comes
from and why you are forwarding it. Failure to do this is
inconsiderate, and the absence of an explanation may perplex the
people you are forwarding the message to. And you must be sure to
place your explanation at the beginning, so that your readers will
read the explanation before they read the forwarded message.
Naturally, you must make it clear which words belong to the
original message and which words have been added by you. The
angle brackets should do this automatically, but you would be wise
to double-check. And you should leave the original signature
untouched: don’t delete the name of the original sender.
Now, as a rule, you should leave the original text undisturbed.
Any editing of the text should be undertaken with the greatest care,
and deletions should be expressly marked with [snip] or […] in the
usual way. Doing anything at all which appears to alter the sense of
the original message is reprehensible behaviour. This is a good way
to make enemies quickly.
There are just a few circumstances in which it is not necessary to
obtain permission before forwarding a piece of mail. One such
circumstance arises when you receive a question which you cannot
answer, and it is obvious that the sender is eager to nd an answer.
In this case, the sender will probably be pleased if you pass on the
question to other people who may be able to provide an answer. But
just make sure, before you forward the question, that there is
nothing con dential about it.
Another circumstance arises with jokes. The constant forwarding
and re-forwarding of jokes is an everyday fact of electronic life. But
listen: everybody gets lots and lots of jokes, and there is no
particular reason why you need to forward the latest joke to
everybody you can think of.
Anyway, bear in mind that, every time a message is forwarded, it
acquires another layer of angle brackets. After six or eight
forwardings, the message will contain more angle brackets than
words, and the lines will be broken up into barely readable
fragments. Unless you are happy to spend a good deal of time
deleting that blizzard of angle brackets – and you’re not, unless your
days are empty indeed – it is best to let the joke die in your inbox.
 I will close this chapter with an important piece of advice: never
send a chain letter. A chain letter is a message which asks you to
forward copies to, say, ten other people, each of whom will be asked
to do the same thing. Chain letters are prohibited everywhere on the
Internet, and forwarding a chain letter may well get you banned
from the Net. If a chain letter arrives in your inbox, you should
notify your system administrator: your Internet service provider,
your employer or your university, as the case may be. The same
goes if you receive anything which appears to be illegal.

Chapter summary:

• Carefully check the addresses you are replying to

• Delete all unneeded material
• Reply point by point, so far as possible
• Be sure you have replied to all points required
• Do not forward mail without permission
 9
Posting to Mailing Lists and Newsgroups

9.1 WHAT IS A LIST?

A mailing list is a service allowing subscribers to exchange emails
on a particular topic. There are thousands of lists out there, so many
that I don’t even know how to nd out how many there are, though
tens of thousands of lists are listed at http://list.com. Many lists are
aimed at professionals who specialize in a particular area, and they
do not welcome beginners, but many other lists are more informal,
and are open to anybody who is interested. There are lists devoted
to almost any area that might be studied in a university: Slavic
languages, asteroids, place names, evolutionary psychology… well,
you get the picture. And, of course, there are lists devoted to non-
academic interests.
I happen to be a professional linguist, so I subscribe to the big list
devoted to general linguistics which practically all linguists
subscribe to. I am a historical linguist, so I subscribe to the list
devoted to historical linguistics. And I’m a specialist in Basque, so I
subscribe to the list devoted to Basque linguistics, and also to the
informal list devoted to Basque culture. In addition, I have some
side interests in a couple of other areas of linguistics, so I also
subscribe to the lists devoted to those topics, so that I can keep
abreast of developments there.
Some lists are huge a airs with thousands of subscribers, while
others have only a handful of subscribers. Some are slick
professional operations, while others are one-man shows that
temporarily fold whenever the owners are too busy to attend to
them. Some have lasted for years, while others appear and then
vanish a few months later. Some lists are dormant, which means
that they still exist, but that they practically never receive any
messages. A very few lists are private, and membership is by
invitation only.
Every list has an owner. The owner is the person who has created
the list, who has arranged the computing facilities that are necessary
to operate the list, and who oversees the running of the list. Usually
the owner is a single person, but, in the case of a large list, the
owner may be a group of people or even an institution.
The name of a list is chosen by its owner. There is no particular
system for creating names of lists, but a common procedure is to use
a contracted form of the name of the list’s subject matter. So, for
example, a list devoted to social psychology might be named
SocPsych.
On a mailing list, we do not speak of ‘sending’ a message. Instead,
we post a message to the list.
There are various ways of classifying lists, but a fundamental
distinction is that between moderated lists and unmoderated lists.
On an unmoderated list, every message posted to the list by a
subscriber is immediately distributed to all the other subscribers. On
a moderated list, each message posted is rst delivered only to the
moderator (normally the list-owner), and the moderator then
decides whether or not the message should be distributed. If the
moderator is not satis ed with the posting, it will be returned to its
sender, either with a request for some rewriting or with a at
rejection. I will explain below why these things might happen.

9.2 SUBSCRIBING TO A LIST

First of all, you must be aware that very many lists are intended
only for professional specialists in the elds to which the lists are
devoted. You should not attempt to join a specialist list unless you
really are a specialist in the relevant eld, or at the very least a
specialist in a related eld. A specialist list will not welcome
beginners’ questions, and you should not try to post elementary
questions to such a list. There are other and more suitable places for
beginners’ questions.
You cannot post to a list, or even read the messages posted to that
list, unless you rst subscribe to it. In order to subscribe, you rst
have to nd out that the list exists, and that is often the hardest
part. In practice, most people nd out about lists devoted to their
professional interests by word of mouth, from colleagues in the
same eld. In linguistics, some of my colleagues maintain a list of
linguistic lists, which can be consulted by anyone looking for a list
devoted to a particular area of linguistics, and I suppose some other
disciplines do the same. Otherwise, you can ask your search engine
to look for lists that you might be interested in.
Once you have discovered a suitable list, you need to nd the
email address to which requests for subscription must be directed.
On some lists, this may be simply the personal address of the list-
owner, but more usually there is a separate address, directed to the
list-server, the computer which manages the business of the list.
This address usually begins with the sequence ‘listserv’, or
sometimes major-domo. You will receive instructions for
subscribing, which will typically involve no more than sending in
your name and your email address in a speci ed format. Once the
list-server has accepted your request to subscribe, you are a member
of the list. That means that you will receive the messages posted to
the list, and that you can post messages yourself.
As soon as you subscribe to a list, you will be sent a page or two
of instructions about how to use that list. Among other things, you
will be told how to subscribe, how to unsubscribe (this awkward
word is now standard), and how to suspend your subscription
temporarily when you’re away, using the Nomail option. Now, here
is some valuable advice: keep a copy of these pages. According to
taste, you can copy them into a le on your computer, or you can
print them out and put the printed pages into a ring binder which
you keep handy. But, whichever you prefer, make sure you keep this
information where you can nd it quickly. If you don’t, you will
eventually regret it, and you will wind up wasting a good deal of
time in trying to nd out something which is explained in these
pages.
There is one thing which you absolutely must understand from
the outset. Every list has two addresses. One is the address of the
list-server, to which messages involving subscriptions must be
directed. The other is the address of the list itself, to which messages
must be posted for distribution. You must keep track of both
addresses, and you must remember which is which. It is all too
common to see bewildered subscribers sending ‘unsubscribe’
messages to the list, which is a futile waste of time for all
concerned. This is one reason why you must keep a copy of those
pages of information.
Some busy lists o er a digest service. If you choose the digest
option, then you won’t receive every message when it is posted.
Instead, about once a week, you will receive a summary of that
week’s postings, and you can choose which ones you want to look
at. The point of the digest is to keep your inbox from being
inundated with postings. I don’t use the digest service, but my
colleagues who do use it report varied experiences. Some digests
apparently work smoothly, while others deliver postings in the form
of attachments (discussed in chapter 6), and these attachments, as
always, may be di cult or impossible to open.

9.3 PROTOCOL
Included in those pages of information which I have just advised
you to keep handy will probably be some guidelines on list protocol.
Check those guidelines; remember them, and follow them. It is the list-
owners who are undertaking all the trouble of setting up and
maintaining the lists, and they are providing this service for free.
They therefore have an absolute right to require subscribers to
behave in a speci ed manner. If you don’t like the list-owner’s rules,
then you should get o the list. You can always set up your own list
with your own rules, you know.
 The rst point, of course, is that each list is devoted to a
particular topic, and therefore only postings on that topic will be
appropriate on that list. Most people understand this simple fact
without coaching, but there are always a few reprobates who are
determined to pursue their own little hobby-horses on any list which
will allow them space to do so. Try not to be one of these pathetic
creatures. It is really the job of the list-owner or moderator to put a
stop to such bad behaviour, but until this happens my advice on
how to cope is given in section 9.9 below.
The guidelines on protocol may include advice on how to ask
questions, how to reply to questions, and how to present the replies
received. In fact, there is a general protocol covering these matters
which is now accepted as standard on most lists. This general
protocol is described in section 9.5 below. However, if the
guidelines for your list say something di erent, then you must fall
into line.
Naturally, the protocol on every list will prohibit aming, or any
kind of o ensive behaviour. On a moderated list, any o ensive
posting will be returned to you at once, at least with a warning not
to try it again. A second o ence, or even an especially bad rst
o ence, will get you thrown o the list – and deservedly so. On an
unmoderated list, your rst o ence will unfortunately be distributed
to everybody, but the list-owner is unlikely to allow you the
opportunity to commit a second o ence.
On every list, there will be occasions on which you disagree
strongly with the views expressed by another subscriber. On such
occasions, it is tempting to launch an all-out attack on the other
person. Try to resist this temptation, since erce attacks will win
you few friends and admirers – unless your target is already
universally hated, which is possible but unlikely.
When you are criticizing another person’s views, it is an excellent
idea to nd at least one point on which you can agree. If you can
write ‘I agree with McGregor on this point, but I disagree strongly
on these other points’, then you will give the impression that you
are engaging in a fair and rational discussion. But, if the tone of
your posting is ‘McGregor is grotesquely and preposterously wrong
on every single point he is foolishly trying to make’, then your
contribution may be seen by many subscribers as little better than a
ame.
There is another point, less obvious than most. Lists vary in the
languages in which they will accept postings. Some lists are very
tolerant, and will accept postings in almost any language which can
be typed in the roman alphabet. Others, however, will accept
postings only in certain speci ed languages, which will be listed in
those pages of protocol.
Of course, almost all lists accept postings in English, and English
is the principal language used on most lists. But there are
exceptions. Amazing as it may seem, there exist lists which do not
welcome postings in English, and which ask subscribers to use some
other language or languages. And there are others in which English
is acceptable, but which in practice receive most of their postings in
other languages. If you want to subscribe to such a list, then of
course you must respect the policy of the list.
Here is a piece of good advice. Once you have subscribed to a list,
spend at least a month watching the list, reading the messages
posted to it, and nding out how that list works. Only once you
have decided that you understand the culture of that list should you
try to post your own messages to it. Subscribing to a list and
following it without posting to it is called lurking, and lurking for a
few weeks at the beginning is an excellent idea. Lurking will help
you to avoid making a public fool of yourself by ring o an email
which is grossly inappropriate on that list.
A message posted to a list is very public. It will be seen by all the
subscribers to that list who bother to open it. Bear in mind that
these subscribers might include the person who is interviewing you
for a job next week. Or they might include someone you don’t know
now but who you will soon nd yourself asking for a big favour.
These are excellent reasons for taking great care in constructing
your postings. One or two overly hasty or thoughtless postings can
quickly give you a bad name, and getting rid of a bad name is far
harder than acquiring it.
On top of this, most lists maintain archives of the postings sent to
them, so your possibly embarrassing words will be stored for years
where anybody can read them.

9.4 THREADS
Very commonly, a posting to a list initiates a discussion, with a
number of subscribers taking part, replying to the original posting,
then replying to those replies, then replying to those further replies,
and so on. A series of postings which are linked in this way is called
a thread. The postings which make up a thread are linked by their
common subject line.
Suppose I subscribe to a list devoted to the origins of language,
and I post a message discussing Michael Corballis’s recent book on
the subject. I might call my posting Corballis’s sign-language
hypothesis. The responses to my posting will automatically receive
the subject line Re: Corballis’s sign-language hypothesis, as
explained in chapter 8, and the further responses will carry the same
subject line. So long as the discussion continues, the subject line will
remain unchanged, providing nobody tampers with it.
And you should not tamper with it, in most circumstances. It is
that common subject line which enables interested subscribers to
follow the discussion without missing a posting, while at the same
time they may not be bothering to open other postings on topics
they are not interested in. Moreover, that common subject line
makes it easy to collect all the messages in the thread when it comes
time to put them into the list’s archives.
There is just one circumstance in which altering the subject line
may be justi ed. This occurs when the subject of the discussion
veers abruptly o in a di erent direction. Suppose, for example, that
one respondent comments on Derek Bickerton’s very di erent ideas,
and then several other people jump in with comments on Bickerton,
forgetting all about Corballis. In such a case, it might be helpful to
change the subject line, and there is a conventional way of doing it.
Here is what the new subject line might look like:
Bickerton’s sudden-emergence scenario [was: Corballis’s sign-language hypothesis]

This is now too long to be fully displayed in subscribers’ inboxes,

but at least the crucial word was might show up, and the full subject
line will be displayed when a subscriber opens the posting.
Even though the repeated subject line will make it clear which
thread your message belongs to, it is still important to make it clear
which particular message from that thread you are replying to.
Hence it is especially important here to identify the sender of that
message. The conventional way of doing so is to introduce the
original message like this:
Peter Davidson writes:

And it is likewise especially important to quote at least a few of the

most critical words from that message. As always, you should not
quote the entire message unless you have a good reason for doing
so, but you must make it clear precisely which point you are
responding to, or nobody will be able to follow your posting.
On a list, it is doubly important to refrain from allowing
undeleted copies of earlier messages to be tacked onto your own
posting. If everybody fails to delete those earlier postings, then it
won’t be long before each new posting on a thread is carrying a
gigantic tail consisting of the entire correspondence so far. This is
grossly inconsiderate of other subscribers, and it pointlessly
occupies a great deal of storage space.
It very often happens that two subscribers become involved in a
discussion of their own. If this happens, then common courtesy
demands that they take their discussion o the list and pursue it
privately – especially if the discussion becomes a little heated. If the
private discussion turns up any points that are likely to be of
interest to the list, one of the participants can always summarize the
discussion to the list.
Finally, if you want to post a contribution to a thread, make sure
rst that you have carefully read all of the postings in that thread so
far submitted. You will look foolish if your posting simply repeats
what someone else has already said, and worse than foolish if your
posting advances an argument which has already been demolished
by another subscriber.

9.5 ASKING QUESTIONS AND REPLYING TO THEM

There is now an established protocol for dealing with questions on a
list. Unless the guidelines for your list say something di erent, here
is how you should behave when you ask a question or when you
reply to one.
Suppose I want to ask a question. Naturally, I must rst determine
that the list I have in mind is a suitable place to ask that question.
Let’s look at a real question which I had occasion to ask some time
ago.
I’m a specialist in Basque, and I was mulling over the origin of the
slightly curious-looking Basque word lanabes, which means ‘tools’,
‘tool set’. Nobody had ever managed to come up with a plausible-
looking explanation of the origin of this word. The word does not
look like native Basque, and it has therefore probably been
‘borrowed’ (as we say) from a neighbouring language – and the only
neighbouring languages are the Romance languages. Of course, I
turned rst to my colleagues on the list devoted to Basque
linguistics, but they couldn’t help. I don’t subscribe to any specialist
Romance lists, and so I turned to the list devoted to historical
linguistics in general. There I posted a question with the following
subject line: Q: A Romance source for Basque <lanabes> ‘tools’?
Note rst that I have used the ‘Q:’ explained in chapter 7. This is
necessary, because not all postings on this list are questions. The
rest of my subject line is an attempt at explaining the nature of my
question as clearly as I can in half-a-dozen words. Then the text of
my question looked like this (followed by my signature):
The Basque word <lanabes> ‘tools, tool set’ has no known etymology. Its form
suggests strongly that it is borrowed. It occurs to me that a Romance plural of the
approximate form <las naves> would be a phonologically perfect source, and would
also account for the collective sense of the Basque word. But I can’t locate any such
Romance form. Does anybody know of such a form, with a suitable meaning?

This question should give you an idea of the kind of thing that is
discussed on specialist lists. This is not the kind of list that will
welcome a beginner’s question like Where does English come from?
Now, once my question had been distributed to the members of
the list, I began to receive a few replies. Let’s talk about the proper
way of replying to a question on a list.
Almost all lists will advise you as follows: reply to the questioner,
not to the list. So, the people who responded to my question replied
to me personally, and only to me. This was easy, because my
signature included my email address right after my name.
The point of this procedure is to refrain from cluttering the list
with private correspondence. The people who replied were only
interested in writing to me, and nobody other than me was
especially interested in reading their replies. It would therefore be
pointless and thoughtless for the respondents to send their responses
to every member of the list. We all get far too much useless mail as
it is, and there is no justi cation for adding to the crowding in
anybody’s inbox.
That said, there is a minor technical issue here. Not all lists are
con gured in the same way. So, when you want to reply to a
question posted to a list, and you click on the Reply option, what
happens? Look at the address inserted into the address line of your
attempted reply. On some lists, you will nd the address of the
questioner – which is exactly what you want. On other lists,
however, you will nd instead the address of the list – which is
de nitely not what you want. On still other lists, you may even nd
both – again, not what you want.
Therefore, when you reply to a question – or to any posting on a
list – you must carefully check to see what address you are replying
to. If you nd yourself looking at anything other than the
questioner’s address, then, sadly, you must go to the trouble of
deleting whatever is there and inserting the required address, which
you can nd somewhere in the questioner’s posting. (Even if he has
foolishly failed to include it in his signature, the list-server has
probably found it and inserted it in a header to his posting.)
This procedure is needlessly tiresome, but I can understand that
some list-owners prefer to keep reply to the list as the default
option. In any case, you must be careful to check, and to amend the
address if necessary, since nobody will thank you for cluttering the
list with private correspondence. If you nd this too tiresome, then
forget about using the Reply option, and just create a new email
with the right address typed in.
I am not just making a dry academic point here. Several years
ago, I posted a question to a huge mailing list. I received a number
of interesting replies. But one colleague, for reasons best known to
himself, decided to reply to me with the intimate details of his
personal problems. He intended to reply only to me, but he failed to
check the address line on his message, and as a result 7,000 people
found themselves reading the distressing details of his divorce and
his ill health.
You might like to know what happened with my question. Several
members of the list sent me interesting replies, but they couldn’t
locate a Romance form of the kind I was looking for. But one
member of that list happened also to be a subscriber to a specialist
Romance list of which I am not a member. So, he forwarded my
question to that other list. And somebody on that list came back to
me with exactly the Romance form I was looking for. That form was
recorded in the twelfth century. And where was it recorded? In
Pamplona – which is in the Basque Country!
 This little example shows just what a wonderful resource email
can be. Before email, my chances of nding that particular Romance
form in that particular twelfth-century document in Pamplona
would have been very small. I would have needed either the luck of
a dozen Irishmen or a t of inspiration approaching genius. Today,
though, I need only to post a question, and within hours scholars all
over the world are getting back to me with their own specialist
knowledge.
Naturally, I sent a brief thank-you message to each person who
had responded to my question. This is standard procedure, and it is
no more than ordinary courtesy.
There remains one nal step. After I have received the responses
to my question, I am expected to post a summary to the list. Posting
a summary is everywhere considered to be courteous and proper
behaviour. So, a week or so after I had posted my question, I posted
my summary to the list on which I had posted it. The subject line of
my summary was this: Sum: A Romance source for Basque
<lanabes>? This example illustrates the conventional format for
posting a summary: the original ‘Q:’ is replaced by ‘Sum:’, but the
rest of the subject line remains as before.
In my summary, I brie y outlined the several responses I had
received, drew attention to the importance of that one remarkable
response, and then thanked all the respondents by name. This last is
important: when you post a summary of responses, you should name
all the people who have replied, and thank them publicly on the list.
By the way, there is an important point here. The summary which
you post to a list should be a genuine summary – that is, a piece of
text which encapsulates the several responses as brie y as possible.
You should not merely post copies of all the replies you have
received, one after another. A compilation of messages is not a
summary, and posting such a mess is bad behaviour.

9.6 CROSS-POSTING
If you subscribe to a number of lists, you may decide occasionally
that a particular posting is appropriate to two or three of those lists.
In this case you will want to consider cross-posting. Cross-posting
is posting the same message to two or more lists simultaneously.
Be careful about cross-posting. Some lists explicitly prohibit cross-
posting, so you must check the protocol for your lists before
engaging in this activity. Once again, you will need to have handy
those pages which you received from each list when you joined it.
If you do go ahead with your cross-posting, explain clearly at the
beginning of your message that you are doing this, and apologize for
it. The reason for the apology is that quite a few other people will
also be subscribed to those lists, and so they will get multiple copies
of your posting. So, if you are cross-posting a message about the
names of some of the characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels,
you might begin like this:
The following message is being cross-posted to TolkienLang, ElfList and HobbitList. My
apologies to those who receive multiple copies.

Such apologies are conventional and expected. They show that you
are aware that you may be inconveniencing other people.
And, of course, don’t cross-post at all without a good reason. If
you cross-post all the time, you will win no friends.
One further point. Replies to cross-postings can become dizzyingly
complicated. Some people may reply to your posting on just one of
your lists, while others may cross-post their replies to two lists or to
all three. Further responses to those responses may likewise turn up
on one, two or three lists. Before long, it will be impossible for
anybody to remember just which comments have appeared on
which lists, and people may be bombarding a list with responses to
messages which have never appeared on that list. This will delight
nobody, and it will especially not delight the owner of the list. If
this happens to you, perhaps you can begin to see why some lists
prohibit cross-posting.
9.7 SOME NO-NOS
There are a few things which you should be careful to avoid on any
list.
Never post merely to correct someone’s English. Doing so is
extremely o ensive, and in the case of a non-native speaker of
English it is doubly o ensive. Don’t even think about trying this.
What about errors of fact? This is more complicated. If the error
of fact is crucial to an argument – that is, if the argument
immediately fails when the error is corrected – then you are
justi ed in posting a correction. But try to do so as courteously as
you can. Don’t accuse the other person of dishonesty. Instead, try to
suggest amiably that he has been misled by out-of-date sources of
information, or something comparably innocuous. Correcting errors
tactfully is a skill which is well worth cultivating if you want your
contributions to be respected and valued by the other list-members.
Look at this example:
Calvin Murtaugh writes:

> The rst organized set of baseball rules was drawn

> up in 1845 by Alexander Cartwright, and those
> rules thereafter became the basis of the game
> all over the USA.

Well, it’s true that this is what all the reference books say, and this is what I was
brought up to believe. But I’ve just been reading Bill James’s latest book, and James
tells us that the Cartwright story has very recently been dismissed by baseball
historians as a myth. For one thing, Cartwright wasn’t even in the country at the time
he was supposed to be drawing up those rules: he was in England. Well, I’m shocked,
of course. It rather looks as though we’re all going to have to accept the shattering of
yet another of our cherished beliefs. Where will it end?

I don’t claim that this e ort is wonderful, since I don’t think I’m as
good at this as I ought to be. But you can see what I’m trying to do:
instead of attacking Murtaugh, I’m trying to suggest instead that we
have all been misled by poor historical work, and that we’re all
going to be upset by the latest ndings. In other words, Murtaugh is
one of us, a fellow su erer, and not an opponent.
If the error is insigni cant, then there is no point in mentioning it
at all. Nobody will be favourably impressed by a posting like this
one:
Mark Richards writes:

> Though no one realized it at the time, the founding of

> Jamestown in 1612 was the rst step in the establishment
> of English as the world’s premier language.

As everybody knows, Jamestown was founded in 1607, not in 1612.

Here the small error in the date is of no earthly signi cance to the
point being made, and this posting is as useless as it is o ensive.
What about an error of intermediate magnitude, one which is
moderately serious but which does not a ect the point being made?
I can cite a good example here, one that happened to me on a list I
was posting to.
I was making the point that any language at all can be
standardized and elaborated by its speakers to serve all possible
functions, if the speakers want to do that. I chose the example of
Finnish, which was formerly only the vernacular household
language of Finland, with no standard form and with no use at all
for such purposes as education, administration and scholarship. I
explained that the Finns had decided to make Finnish their national
language, and that they had rst created a standard form and then
developed the necessary vocabularies, constructions and styles to
allow Finnish to be used for all purposes. Fine, but I asserted that
this process had begun only with Finnish independence in 1918.
I was in error. A Finnish subscriber mailed me privately to explain
that, in fact, these developments had begun in the nineteenth
century, before independence. And this was perfect behaviour. My
error was serious enough to deserve correction, but it was
nevertheless of no relevance to the point I was making. So he mailed
me personally with the necessary correction, instead of posting it to
the list.
And this is what you should do. If you decide that a correction is
called for, send it privately to the person whose words you are
correcting, and not to the list, unless you conclude that a correction
on the list is unavoidable. I thanked my Finnish correspondent
warmly, and you can expect the same treatment.
Don’t post merely to express agreement. I do not want to open a
posting in my inbox only to nd myself reading a message I read
yesterday, with I agree tacked on at the end.
Don’t ramble. Long and meandering posts are a quick way of
losing friends. If you su er from a rambling prose style, you will just
have to put in a lot of work editing your postings before you send
them in.
Don’t wander o the point. If you get wrapped up in a side issue,
then start a separate thread on that issue – providing it is a topic
which is appropriate to that list. If it’s not appropriate to that list,
forget it. If you’re on a list devoted to medical ethics, and the
discussion of a particular case leads you o into a consideration of
the behaviour of lawyers in an unrelated case of oil pollution, don’t
try to shove your views of this unrelated case down the throats of
the other subscribers.
Don’t ask technical questions about email or the Internet, or about
any aspect of computing. If you do, you can expect to receive the
irritated reply RTFM, which stands for ‘read the [censored] manual’.
Don’t re-post your message because ten minutes has elapsed and
you haven’t seen it distributed yet. Wait for a couple of days, and
then contact the list-owner.
Never post an attachment to a list. If the material is too long to
incorporate into your posting, then put it into a web page, and post
the URL. And, of course, never try to post an entire website.
Never try to post a forgery, not even as a spoof. And don’t try to
send in an anonymous posting from which your name and address
have been removed (though most list-servers won’t accept
anonymous postings anyway). Make sure everything you post has
your name and address on it. If you disregard this advice, it will not
be long before you nd yourself booted o the list, and with good
reason.
Don’t try to post advertising. Most mailing lists prohibit
advertising. Some will accept advertisements of particular kinds –
most commonly, ads from publishers announcing books in the eld
to which the list is devoted – but only by agreement, and often only
in return for a fee.
Finally, don’t allow your mailer to send vacation messages to a
list. A vacation message, or out-of-o ce message, is a xed
response which you can set up on your mailer if you’re going to be
away from your mail for quite a while – say, for a couple of weeks.
This message simply says something like I’m away from my mail
until 27 August, and I will read your mail entitled […] when I
return. This message is sent automatically by your mailer to every
single person who sends you an email during your absence. This is
perhaps ne with human beings. But, if you get twenty- ve postings
from your list during your absence, the list will receive twenty- ve
copies of your vacation message – and this is going to earn you no
friends at all.
If you’re going to set up a vacation message, then you should set
your subscription to Nomail while you’re away, as explained in
those instructions which I earlier advised you strongly to keep a
copy of, and which you have now probably lost, just when you need
them. Otherwise, you should unsubscribe temporarily from the list –
but you’ll need those instructions in order to do this, too.

9.8 APOLOGIES
Electronic protocol is not so di erent from everyday courtesy. If you
make a mistake, then you should apologize.
 One of the most frequent blunders is posting a private message to
the list. It is easy to do this if you are a little inattentive about
checking the address line when you click on the Reply button. If you
make this mistake, then you should post a brief apology to the list.
Posting an apology has the drawback of adding yet another message
to every subscriber’s inbox, but it is nevertheless necessary. Your
apology shows that you have simply slipped up, and that you know
you have slipped up, and that you are not the sort of idiot who
doesn’t understand how a list works and what can be properly
posted to a list.
You should also apologize if you discover that you have
inadvertently posted something to the list which is seriously wrong.
There is no need to apologize for trivial errors, or for errors that
have no bearing on your argument. But, if you have asserted
something which is crucial to your argument, and which turns out
to be false, then you must apologize.
Of course, nobody enjoys apologizing, but failure to apologize in
this circumstance is dishonourable and unacceptable. Once you’ve
been forced to apologize for a bad mistake, you will probably begin
to appreciate the value of double-checking your messages before
you send them. And perhaps you will also appreciate the foolishness
of the position I dismissed in chapter 1: ‘Oh, email is just like
conversation, and careful editing is out of place.’

9.9 NUTTERS AND TROUBLEMAKERS

Sooner or later, almost every list attracts the attention of a crackpot
or a troublemaker. We are particularly unfortunate in my own eld
of linguistics, since language is a topic that seems to attract more
nutters than most. But probably no discipline is entirely free of the
attentions of these pathetic people. Even such hard sciences as
physics, astronomy and biology are plagued by strange individuals
who claim that they have carbon-dated the atmosphere, that NASA
faked the moon landings, or that the dinosaurs perished in Noah’s
ood.
 What is to be done when one of these people turns up on your
favourite list? Well, it is really the responsibility of the list-owner or
moderator to exclude crackpots and abusive people, but some list-
owners are slower to respond than others. As a result, you may nd
your list defaced for a while by unpleasant or deranged postings
which should never have been allowed to circulate.
On the whole, it is wise to ignore such postings altogether. It is
impossible to argue rationally with these people, and even the most
patient and careful responses to their pestilential messages will
achieve nothing beyond eliciting more of the same. However, if you
absolutely can’t bear to let their rubbish pass unchallenged – and
sometimes I can’t – then you might permit yourself one careful
response. But that’s it. Attempting to engage in a debate with one of
these people will merely waste large chunks of your time.
If the list-owner appears to be slow in recognizing the problem, a
private approach might be in order. Some of the bigger lists have a
built-in complaints procedure which you can turn to.

9.10 NEWSGROUPS
A newsgroup resembles a mailing list, but it is typically much more
informal. Newsgroups are aimed at enthusiasts, not at specialists,
and you will be welcome on any newsgroup, so long as you behave
yourself. Newsgroups have a di erent ‘feel’ from mailing lists. They
are sometimes called ‘electronic notice boards’, because their
threads often look more like a series of notices than like the
discussions found on mailing lists.
The number of newsgroups is vast – more than 100,000,
according to an estimate I saw recently. If you can think of a subject
that might conceivably interest at least three people, there is
probably a newsgroup devoted to it: the fantasy writings of J. R. R.
Tolkien, classic cars, Chinese porcelain, the Kennedy assassination…
Unlike mailing lists, newsgroups are named in a moderately
organized way. The name of a newsgroup consists of two parts,
separated by a full stop. The rst part is the hierarchy, which is
meant to explain the general nature of the groups it contains, such
as sci. for a scienti c topic, biz. for a business topic, or the
celebrated alt. for ‘alternative’ (miscellaneous) topics. There are
about nine big hierarchies, each containing hundreds or thousands
of groups. The second part brie y identi es the particular topic. For
example, sci.lang is the newsgroup devoted to the discussion of
languages and linguistics, while the alt. hierarchy contains such
intriguing groups as alt.cows and alt.cheese, whose contents I have
not investigated. The names of many newsgroups contain a third
element narrowing down the preceding element, such as
sci.lang.japan for discussion of Japanese language.
The original intention was to keep the number of hierarchies
small, but things have not worked out that way. Today there are
thousands of additional hierarchies, each containing anywhere from
one group to several dozen groups. For example, the island of
Bermuda has its own bermuda, hierarchy, with over a dozen groups
dealing with such topics as tourism, politics and property for sale.
Long lists of newsgroups can be found on the Web (look under
Usenet). Two URLs which publish very long lists of newsgroups are
http://www.harley.com/ Usenet and http://www.tile.net.
Newsgroups di er from lists in a mechanical but important way.
You don’t send and read postings by means of your ordinary mailer
program. Instead, you use a newsreader. A newsreader is a
specialized program which allows you to join any newsgroups you
like, to read postings and to post messages yourself. Some
newsreaders allow you to con gure (arrange) the messages on a
newsgroup to suit yourself. For example, you may be able to set
your reader to display only those postings you haven’t yet read, so
that you don’t have to wade through eighty or ve hundred
messages in a single thread to nd the ones you haven’t looked at
yet.
There are many newsreaders available on the Web, and they are
normally free. Some browsers and search engines provide
newsreaders as part of their service. Quite possibly your computer
came with a newsreader already provided. You are not obliged to
commit yourself to any one reader: if you like, you can jump back
and forth among several readers.
Once you choose a newsreader, it will ask you for your email
address and it will ask you to choose a password (or it may simply
assign you a password, but most readers let you choose your own).
Then it will take you to an alphabetical list of newsgroups, and you
can join as many groups as you like. Unlike what happens with lists,
there is no need to sign up separately for each group you are
interested in.
When you look at a group, you will nd that the postings are
grouped into named threads. The name of a thread is the subject
line of the rst posting in that thread. Depending on how long the
thread has been active, and on how much interest it has attracted,
the number of postings in a thread can vary from one to a thousand
or more.
As a rule, newsgroups are much more informal than lists. There is
practically no moderation, and very many postings consist of idiotic
jokes, wearisome irrelevancies or childish abuse. Nutters and
troublemakers ourish on many groups, and the decorum enforced
on most lists is conspicuously absent. Many of the stranger
participants hide their identities behind pseudonyms. Only a few
users bother to delete unnecessary material, and it is commonplace
to see a posting consisting of 600 lines repeated from a sequence of
eight earlier postings plus one line contributed by the person
posting now.
Once again, if you join a newsgroup, it is very wise to watch it for
a few weeks before you try to post anything. On the whole,
newsgroups tolerate doubtful behaviour more readily than do
mailing lists. But you should watch to see what the practice is on
the group you have just joined: some groups are more restrained
than others.
Newsgroups have a few conventions of their own, not shared with
mailing lists. Here is an example. If you are talking about a book or
a lm, and your posting reveals something important about the plot,
then you are expected to include the word Spoiler in your subject
line, as a warning to subscribers who may not yet have read the
book or seen the lm, and who do not want to have crucial plot
developments given away. Here is an example, involving the lm A
Bronx Tale. If you haven’t seen this lm, and you don’t want to have
the ending given away now, then don’t read the example:
_A Bronx Tale_ (Spoiler)

At the end of this lm, the hero’s four friends are horribly killed when their car
catches re and explodes. Their charred bodies are displayed on screen, making one of
the most gruesome scenes ever shown in a Hollywood movie.

A peculiarity of some newsreaders is that they may o er you the

opportunity of posting only to some subscribers. This is done by
means of the distribution option, which you can set for a particular
geographical area, in which case only the subscribers in that area
will receive your posting.
Some newsgroups are highly tolerant of postings that some
subscribers may nd o ensive. If you join one of these, and you nd
yourself o ended by the tone of a posting, or of a string of postings,
there is probably little point in complaining. You should probably
have discovered the nature of the group during the weeks you spent
lurking without posting. If you nd the postings too much to
stomach, you should just leave the group. There is no point in
posting just to let other people know you are o ended.

Chapter summary:

• When you subscribe to a list, keep a copy of the instructions

• Respect the protocol of the list
• Keep cross-posting to a minimum
• Be unfailingly courteous
• Keep your postings brief and to the point
• Never post an attachment
• Don’t allow vacation messages to be sent to the list
• If you make a bad mistake, correct it and apologize
• Don’t expect civilized behaviour on a newsgroup
 10
Con dentiality and Legal Requirements

10.1 THE LIMITATIONS OF EMAIL PRIVACY

Compared to most other forms of writing, email is ephemeral. But it
is nowhere near as ephemeral as you might suppose. It is easy to get
the impression that your message leaps directly from your computer
to your recipient’s computer, and that it vanishes from the universe
the moment the recipient deletes it. But this is not so.
Every message you send passes through a series of computers
before reaching its destination. Every one of those computers is
capable of intercepting, copying and storing your message, and
some of them are very likely doing that – not because They are out
to get you, but merely as part of the machines’ routine backup
procedures.
As I write, it has not been long since our newspapers here in
Britain were dominated by a story of some peculiar dealings
between the wife of our prime minister and an Australian con man.
At one point, a newspaper got hold of copies of a number of private
emails which had passed between the two, and it published them.
Well, it’s interesting that a newspaper can publish private emails
with impunity. But the point is this: if the prime minister’s wife can
nd her private emails intercepted and published, then so can you.
Email, in short, is anything but con dential and secure. It is
potentially public, and on occasion it becomes genuinely public. So,
if you wouldn’t want to see it posted on a public notice board with
your name attached, don’t put it into an email.
In most countries, emails can be subpoenaed by courts, and they
may be liable to disclosure under your country’s Freedom of
Information Act. In Britain – and doubtless in other countries – the
police and the intelligence services intercept emails, and the number
of emails intercepted grows substantially every year.
You should never email con dential information like credit-card
numbers: to do so is to invite serious trouble. Likewise, you should
never email con dential or personal information about a third
party. Doing so is certain to be a violation of your country’s version
of the Data Protection Act, and it will get you into trouble with the
law. You should not even email another person’s home address,
phone number or email address without express permission to do so.
If you are surprised that I am advising you not to put another
person’s email address into your email without permission, there is
a good reason for this: some people do not want their email
addresses to be generally known. Consider a certain colleague of
mine. He went away for a few days, and on his return he found his
inbox jammed with over 2,000 spam messages. He therefore
changed his email address, and, understandably, he is keeping his
new address secret from all but a few trusted colleagues.
And I hardly need mention that emails containing sexual or racial
harassment or incitement to violence are serious o ences in law. If
you are one of those pathetic individuals who believe that ‘just
kidding around’ is something entirely di erent from sexual
harassment, then you will doubtless deserve the trouble you get
yourself into.
You also need to be careful about printing emails. If you print a
private email on a public printer, dozens of people may have a
chance to read that mail before you come along and collect it.
There is another point. Many mailer programmes o er the
possibility of keeping a copy of every email sent. Do you know if
your mailer has such an option? Do you know if it’s switched on?
Maybe you should nd out. Quite apart from any considerations of
security, storing a pile of ancient emails chews up a lot of disk
space.
Computers are built in such a way that they keep a record of
almost everything done on them. When you ‘delete’ a document
from your machine, all you are doing is removing the link that
allows you to recover the document instantly. The document itself is
probably still sitting there on your hard disk, and it can be
recovered by anyone who has the technical know-how. It is really
not very easy to obliterate a document from a computer beyond all
chance of recovery.
Not long ago, a university in Britain sold a number of surplus
computers. The university sta had doubtless ‘deleted’ all les from
the machines before they were sold. Nevertheless, the people who
bought the machines discovered that a good deal of highly
con dential information was still sitting on the hard disks of those
computers. As a result, the university is now facing a blizzard of
lawsuits for violation of Britain’s Data Protection Act, and the
nancial consequences are likely to be frightening.
Moreover, there are grounds for supposing that email privacy will
soon become even less of a reality than it is now. Not long ago, the
British government tried to compel all Internet service providers in
Britain to make and store copies of all emails passing through their
machines, in case some agency of the government might want to
examine one of them one day. This rst attempt was successfully
rebu ed by the providers, largely on grounds of cost. But it would
be foolish to bet against another and more determined attempt in
the near future.
A nal point. You may not even own the emails that you send. If
you send an email from your computer at work, then your employer
probably owns that email. This is true even if your employer has
given you permission to use your work computer for private emails.
If you send an email from a computer owned by your university,
then the university probably owns the mail. If you send an email
from an Internet café, then the café probably owns the mail. You
only own your mail if you send it from a machine at home which
you own – but even then your Internet service provider may have
some claim.

10.2 LIBEL
The Internet is a di use a air. Nobody is in charge of it, and we can
seldom declare with con dence that any piece of it exists in any
particular location. This di useness has for years made the Net
something of a free-for-all, with fewer constraints on what can be
published than we nd in other domains. However, things are
changing.
The use of the Internet to promote terrorism, paedophilia and
organized crime has induced police forces, and therefore
governments, to try to crack down on the much-vaunted freedom of
the Net, to suppress some activities and to supervise others. As I
write, for example, the British government is preparing to introduce
stringent new requirements for Internet chatrooms, in the hope of
protecting children from the paedophiles who use chatrooms to
attract victims. No one can object to this goal.
But, of course, there are always those who have never cared much
for the free expression which has typi ed the Net. Governments,
businesses, and rich and powerful individuals are among those who
hate any kind of scrutiny of their activities. Pressure from all these
directions has therefore been growing, with the goal of constraining
what can be said on the Net. In particular, there is pressure to
extend the laws of libel to the Internet.
Applying libel laws to the Net has generally been di cult for
several reasons, but especially because of the problem of
jurisdiction. Since the Net is not located in a particular place, it is
not so easy to determine who has jurisdiction in the event of an
alleged libel. This uncertainty has helped to protect freedom of
speech on the Net.
But, of course, this too is changing. Very recently, a projected
prosecution for libel has been worrying almost every organization
and institution involved with the Net.
The case is this. An American business magazine which is
distributed on line published an article which was critical of an
Australian businessman. That businessman has responded by
attempting to sue the magazine’s publisher for libel. Critically, and
controversially, he has been granted permission by the Australian
courts to sue in Australia – even though the magazine has only a tiny
handful of subscribers in Australia. Why does this matter?
The laws of libel vary greatly from country to country. In the
United States, prosecutions for libel are heavily constrained by the
constitutional right to freedom of speech, and by a Supreme Court
ruling that public gures may not invoke the libel laws in order to
prevent scrutiny of their activities. As a consequence, prosecutions
for libel in the USA cannot hope to succeed except in the most
agrant cases.
But other countries are very di erent. At the opposite pole is
Britain, whose laws of libel are weighted heavily and disgracefully
in favour of a plainti . In Britain, almost any remark which is less
than admiring can lead to a prosecution for libel, and that
prosecution will very likely succeed. Even an admiring remark can
be grounds for libel if it is adjudged to be sarcastic. A defendant in a
libel case in Britain nds the cards stacked against him to an extent
which is beyond belief. And, it appears, the libel laws in Australia
are similar to those in Britain.
This is why the businessman wanted to sue in Australia, rather
than in the USA, where he would probably have no chance of
success. And this is why so many organizations, from Internet
service providers to the giant bookseller Amazon.com, have banded
together to try to oppose what is happening in Australia.
The point of this little discussion is that you cannot now expect to
be immune from the laws of libel in your own Internet activities.
Even if you live in a country with rational laws of libel, like the
USA, the Australian case shows that you are not safe from
prosecution in another country with few safeguards for free speech.
So, as the sergeant used to say on Hill Street Blues, be careful out
there. When you are writing an email, even a private one to be sent
only to a single close friend, be wary of writing anything which is
critical of any person or organization. I’m not saying that you
should never write anything critical at all, but only that you should
think carefully about what you are writing. Even describing an
obvious nutter as a nutter can be risky. Some nutters are litigious,
and even crackpots can sue for libel.
There is one more point. Even in the USA, with its admirable laws
of libel, there is a way of crippling somebody who says rude things
about you. Suppose you publish an article which is critical of me in
the USA, and nowhere else. I now announce that I am suing you for
libel. You must now begin preparing your defence, and that means
that you must spend a great deal of money. After you have spent a
huge sum in preparing your defence, I suddenly announce that I am
dropping my prosecution.
Of course, I never had a realistic chance of winning anyway,
which is why I am giving up. But you are now stuck. You have spent
a pile of money, and quite possibly you are now deeply in debt. You
cannot claim that money back from me, at least not without
launching a counter-prosecution, which means spending yet more
money.
All this is nasty and unprincipled, but it has been done
successfully in a number of high-pro le cases in the United States.

10.3 COPYRIGHT
Email is not exempt from the laws of copyright. If you didn’t write
it, then you don’t own it, and putting it into an email without
express permission from the owner is a violation of copyright, and
therefore a crime.
Prosecutions of private individuals for violation of copyright have
so far been rare occurrences, but this is so partly because it is not
easy at present for authors to discover that their work has been
illegally copied into a private email. With the development of new
technology, this state of a airs may change.
Things are di erent if you mail material illegally to a large
number of recipients – say to an entire electronic list. In this case
your misbehaviour will be obvious to very many people, and it is
more likely to come to the attention of the aggrieved author.
 The law of copyright allows very brief quotations for reasonable
purposes. You are unlikely to get into trouble if you copy one
de nition from a dictionary into your email – though you must
acknowledge your source in full, of course. But copying a dozen
de nitions from the same dictionary is almost certainly illegal. And
copying an entire encyclopedia article will surely get you into
trouble if the publisher nds out about it.
If you have never thought about copyright before, the idea is
simple: it is against the law to copy someone else’s work without
permission. This is true even if you acknowledge your source.
Observe that we are not talking here about the very di erent
o ence of plagiarism, which consists of stealing another person’s
work and presenting it as your own. The point here is that even
open and honest copying of someone else’s work is a violation of
copyright.
If you are delighted by something you nd on Dr Alice Bloom’s
website, it is ne for you to email the URL of that website to other
people who you think may be interested. But it is not ne for you to
copy a long passage from that website and email this to anybody
else, either in the body of your mail or in an attachment. Such
copying is a crime.

10.4 DISCLAIMERS
The misuse of email has begun to be seen as a serious problem by
business rms and other organizations. If you send an illegal or
improper email from your work computer or from your university
computer, you will get yourself into trouble, but you will also get
your employer or your university into trouble.
This is why many businesses and other organizations now impose
strict guidelines on the use of email by their sta s. But many rms
have found it necessary to go further, and to add disclaimers to all
outgoing email. A disclaimer is a statement designed to protect its
rm from some types of legal action. A typical disclaimer looks like
this:
 This email is intended only for those recipients to whom it is expressly addressed. If
you are not one of these recipients, and this email has reached you, then you should
notify the sender and delete all copies of this mail. The contents of this mail do not
necessarily represent the views or policies of the Global Publishing House.

At present, it is not thought necessary for private individuals to

attach disclaimers to their mail. But most businesses now consider
them essential, to minimize the damage from irresponsible or
malicious emails sent by members of their sta . It is, however,
beyond the scope of this book to o er advice on this matter. There
now exist several books which provide good legal advice to
businesses on the management of email, and there are quite a few
legal rms which o er similar advice.
 Glossary

address See email address.

address book A section of your mailer program in which you can
store the email addresses you use frequently, in a manner that
allows you to insert one of them into a new email with a click of
your mouse.
address line The line in a new email message into which you insert
the address(es) to which you are sending the mail.
alias A generic email address covering a number of people. Mail
sent to an alias will be delivered to every person included in the
alias.
angle bracket The character >, which is used to mark o material
which is being quoted from an earlier message.
archives On a mailing list or a newsgroup, a set of les containing
records of messages posted to it, usually with some device for
searching those les.
ASCII An internationally agreed set of numbers for encoding 128
items: the ninety- ve keyboard characters (including the space)
plus some formatting commands. The letters stand for ‘American
Standard Code for Information Interchange’.
aside A comment inserted into the text of an email in order to
express the writer’s attitude, such as <yawn> or <hug>.
at-sign The symbol @, which always appears in the middle of an
email address, where it separates the username from the domain
name.
attachment A document which already exists on your computer
and which is copied into a special place in an email, so that the
 document arrives along with the mail.
bcc line A special address line with this property: any address typed
into it will receive the mail, but no recipient will see the
addresses on this line.
bounce Your message bounces when it is returned to you with an
error message explaining that it cannot be delivered.
broadband A way of connecting a computer to the Internet. A
broadband connection is much faster than a connection by
modem.
browser A piece of software which allows you to read web pages.
cc A copy of an email sent to someone who is not expected to
respond.
cc line The line at the top of an email window into which you can
insert the addresses of people to whom you want to send your
mail but from whom you expect no response.
chain letter An email which asks the recipient to send copies of it
to perhaps ten other people, who will be asked to do the same
thing, and so on. Chain letters are prohibited on the Internet.
compatibility The degree to which one machine or piece of
software can work successfully with another.
control character A character which is not included in the ordinary
ASCII set, which is therefore not normally present on a keyboard,
and which can only be produced by using one of the special keys
like Control, Command or Alt.
conversion The process of changing a document from one piece of
software into another.
cross-posting Posting the same message to two or more mailing
lists or newsgroups.
cut and paste Moving pieces of text from one place to another.
diacritic A squiggle added to a letter to indicate some thing about
its pronunciation, as with é, ñ or ç.
digest On a mailing list, an arrangement by which a subscriber
receives only a weekly summary, instead of receiving each posting
individually.
disclaimer A formal statement attached to all emails sent from a
business rm or other organization and intended to minimize the
damage from improper or wayward emails.
domain name The part of your email address which comes after the
at-sign.
dormant list A mailing list to which nobody is any longer posting
any messages.
email Electronic mail, the technology which allows computer-users
all over the world to exchange typed messages via the Internet.
email address The sequence of characters which identi es a
particular user of email. Example: chris.woods @whiz.net.
emoticon A cute little sideways face created with key board
characters, intended to express something about the writer’s mood
or attitude, such as :^0 (surprise) or :-(sadness).
extended ASCII A set of numbers for encoding and transmitting a
further 128 characters beyond those encoded in ASCII.
FAQs A list of frequently asked questions, with answers. Many
electronic services provide lists of FAQs within their area of
interest.
aming The sending of abusive and o ensive email.
font See typeface.
forwarding Passing on an email you have received from one person
to another person.
FYI:‘For your information’: an item attached to the subject line of an
email which requires no response.
header A sequence of lines at the beginning of an email message,
providing such information as the sender, the recipient, the date
and the subject.
hierarchy The rst part of a newsgroup name, explaining its
general nature, such as sci. (scienti c topic).
HTML The special markup language used for constructing web
pages. The letters stand for ‘Hypertext Markup Language’.
inbox The window on your mailer which displays a list of all the
emails you have received and not yet deleted.
Internet A vast network of computers all over the world linked by
cables allowing them to exchange information. It is the Net which
makes possible email and the World Wide Web.
Internet service provider The organization which provides you
with access to the Internet, thus making email possible.
ISP See Internet service provider.
junk mail See spam.
line length The number of characters, including spaces, which your
mailer will allow to occur in a single line before the line is
wrapped.
list See mailing list.
list-owner The person who has set up a mailing list and who
undertakes the responsibility of keeping it running.
list-server The computer which manages the business of a mailing
list and to which all messages about subscriptions should be
directed.
[long] A caution added to the subject line of an email which is
more than one hundred lines long.
lurking Subscribing to a mailing list or a newsgroup and reading
the postings without posting anything oneself.
mailer A program (a piece of software) which allows you to send
and receive emails, providing you have a connection to the
Internet and an email address.
mailing list An electronic service which allows subscribers to
exchange messages on the particular topic to which the list is
devoted.
mail spool See inbox.
major-domo See list-server.
modem A device which allows a computer to be connected to the
Internet by means of an ordinary telephone line.
moderated list A mailing list which is organized so that each
posting submitted is rst scrutinized by a moderator, who decides
whether or not it should be distributed to the list.
moderator On a moderated list, the person who supervises the list
and decides which messages should be posted.
Net See Internet.
Netiquette The set of rules constituting courteous and proper
behaviour in email, and on the Internet generally.
newsgroup An electronic service which is similar to a mailing list
but less formal, and which must be accessed with a newsreader.
newsreader A piece of software which allows you to read postings
on newsgroups and to post to those groups.
on line You are on line when your computer is connected to the
Internet.
out-of-o ce message See vacation message.
owner See list-owner.
plaintext Ordinary text, consisting only of the ninety-four standard
keyboard characters and the space, with no control characters.
post To post a message is to send it to a mailing list or a newsgroup.
preferences The section of your mailer program which allows you
to arrange features of your mail to suit your taste.
protocol On a mailing list or a newsgroup, the set of rules
governing proper behaviour.
Q: An item attached to the beginning of the subject line of an email
which is a question.
Re: An item whose presence at the beginning of a subject line shows
that the current message is a reply to an earlier message.
Req: An item attached to the beginning of the subject line of an
email which is a request.
RichText A simple format into which word-processed documents
can be converted in order to minimize the di culty of opening
and reading them.
salutation The (optional) opening greeting in an email, such as
Dear Mike.
search engine A piece of software which allows you to search the
Web for pages on a particular topic.
.sig See signature(sense 2).
signature 1. The name (and possibly other information) which you
place at the end of your emails. 2. The section of your mailer
program which allows you to construct such a signature.
smiley The character ;-), which indicates that the material
preceding it is a joke. (Note: some people use the term ‘smiley’
more generally, as a label for any emoticon.)
snail mail Ordinary paper mail, the kind delivered by the post
o ce.
[snip] An item inserted into a quoted message to show that
material has been deleted.
spam Electronic junk mail: mail from strangers whose purpose is to
extract money from you, honestly or dishonestly.
subject line The line at the top of an email which announces its
subject.
Sum: An item whose presence in a subject line indicates that the
current message is a summary of the responses to an earlier
question.
summary A message posted to a mailing list summarizing the
responses to a question asked earlier.
thread On a mailing list or a newsgroup, a series of related postings
on a common topic, normally united by a common subject line.
typeface A particular style of type – in other words, a particular
way of shaping the letters of the alphabet and the other characters
which appear on the screen.
Unicode A system which allows software to display thousands of
characters, including for example phonetic symbols and Chinese
characters.
unmoderated list A mailing list which is organized so that every
posting to it is immediately distributed to all subscribers, without
scrutiny.
URL The address of a web page. The letters stand for ‘Universal
Resource Locator’.
username The part of your email address that comes before the at-
sign.
vacation message A message which you set up on your mailer
program when you are away from your mail for some time. It
automatically acknowledges the reception of every message that
arrives and sends out a warning of your absence.
virus A destructive program which causes great damage to any
computer onto which it is introduced. Viruses are carried by email
attachments.
Web See World Wide Web.
World Wide Web The totality of the pages (documents) stored on
all the computers linked by the Internet, plus the programs that
allow a person at one computer to read pages stored on another.
wrap When the length of the current line reaches the length limit
set for your mailer, the text wraps: it starts a new line
automatically.
 Index

abbreviations
AFAIK 64–5
BTW65
FAQ 111–12, 200
FYI 43–4, 200
IMHO 64–5
IMNSHO 65
IWBNI 65
LOL 98
OTOH 65
Q 43, 114–15, 116–19, 168, 203
ROTFL 98
RSN 65
RTFM 177
primary message 66
TIA 65
UKP 83
USD 83
use of 63–4
YMMV 66
accents 83–5, 199
addiction to emailing, dangers of 34–5
address: see email addresses
address book 36–7, 197
address lines 35, 197
multiple addresses 37
proofreading 35–6
replies 137–8
advertising 177–8
advice, handing out 151–3
AFAIK (as far as I know) 64–5
aliases 32–3, 197
AltaVista 18
Amazon, the 118–19
American dollar sign 81, 83
ampersand (&) 64
angle brackets (< >)
enclosing URLs 95
in forwarded messages 154–5, 156
in replies 140–42, 145, 147, 197
as substitute for italics 89
anonymous messages 5, 25, 115–16, 177
apologies 178–9
appearance, checking 57–8
appropriateness 34
archives 112, 164, 197
ASCII code 80–81, 197
asides 98–9, 197–8
Ask Jeeves 18
asterisks, as emphasis marks 86–7
at–sign (@) 198
attachments 100–101, 198
audio 107–8
compatibility 101–3
compressing 104
conversions 103–4, 199
and copyright 108
covering messages 102, 106–7
and empty messages 106–7
forwarding 106
and mailing lists 177
simplicity of 102
size 104–6
and viruses 106, 107
Austen, Jane 118–19

background colour 22
baseball 118–19
bcc (blind cc) line 38, 198
blind people 30
bounces 36, 198
breeziness 71
brevity 62
British pound sign 81, 83
broadband Internet connection 18, 198
browsers 18, 198
BTW (by the way) 65
bullet points 61
buttons
Forward 154
Recall this message 11–12
Reply 137, 138
Reply All 138
Send 11

capital letters
for emphasis 87
in subject lines 39
in titles of works 87
use of 67–9
cc ‘carbon copy’ 37, 198
cc line 37–8, 138, 198
chain letters 156, 198–9
character spacing 56
chatrooms 190
clarity 7, 13–14, 58–9, 116–19, 120–27, 148–51
columns 56
compatibility 101–3, 199
con dential information, security of 187–9
con dential messages, subject lines 44–5
con dentiality 186–9
control characters: see special characters
conventions of email: see netiquette
conversions 103–4, 199
copyright 108, 193–4
costs 8–9
country codes 132
country of origin, identifying 131–2
courtesy 50, 173–6
criticism, of emailing technique 151–3
cross–posting 172–3, 199
cultural di erences 10–11
currency symbols 81
cut and paste 57, 199

Data Protection Act 187

date formats 10–11
decoration of signatures 29–30
deletion
based on subject lines 39–40
of stored information 188–9
of unwanted material from replies 143, 145, 147
diacritics 199
problems with using 83–4
solutions 84–5
digests 160, 199
disclaimers 195–6, 199
domain names 19–22, 199

editing 11, 74–7, 176

electronic answering services 112–13, 116
electronic resources archives 112
FAQs 111–12, 200
email addresses 17, 200
algebraic 35–6
aliases 32–3, 197
citing 96
country codes 132
domain name 19–22, 199
in headers 134–5
inclusion in signatures 27–8
mailers and 16
mailing lists 159–60
parts of 19
security of 187–8
shared 30
emoticons 91–3, 200, 204
emphasis 86–7
empty messages 106–7
English, use of
American standard 53
British standard 53
correcting errors 173
non–native 53, 64
standard 52–3
enumeration 60–62
equipment 8–9
extended ASCII 83, 200
face to face conversation 34
FAQs (frequently asked questions) 111–12, 200
le transfer 104
lters 73
aming 78–9, 162, 200
font size 22, 23
fonts: see typefaces
foreign words 88–9
forged messages 136–7, 177
formatting 56–8
forwarding
attachments 106
messages 154–6
freedom of expression 190
Freedom of Information Act 187
frequently asked questions: see FAQs
friends
emails to 6–7
salutations 47
FYI (for your information) 43–4, 200

gibberish 46
Google 18
grammar 54
Great Britain, libel laws 190–92

hash mark (#) 81

haste, need to avoid 7–8
headers 134–5, 200
HTML code 45–6, 201

idioms 9
IMHO (in my humble opinion) 64–5
IMNSHO (in my not–so– humble opinion) 65
impression created 2
inbox 201
clogging 33
sender identi cation 19–20
subject line 38
indenting 55
information sources 109–12
interception of emails 186–7
Internet, the 190, 201
Internet connection
broadband 18, 198
cost of 8
modem 17–18, 202
Internet Explorer 18
Internet service providers (ISPs) 16–17, 19, 201
ISPs: see Internet service providers (ISPs)
italics, substitutes for 87, 89
IWBNI (it would be nice if) 65

jokes 9, 91–3, 155–6

junk mail: see spam (junk mail)

keyboard instructions, emailing 96–8

keys
Delete 23
Return 56
Shift 97–8
Tab 56
typing instructions to use 96–8
length 62, 202
libel 191–3
line length 23–4, 201
list–owners 158, 201
list–servers 159, 201
literacy 39
live links 93–5
LOL (laughing out loud) 98
[long] 43, 202
lurking 164, 184, 185, 202

Macs 83, 101

mail spool: see inbox
mailer programs (mailers) 15–16, 202
and attachment size 104
compatibility 101
copies of sent messages 188
creation of live links 93–5
and diacritics 83–5
 and HTML code 45–6
inability to display non-ASCII special characters 83
and signatures 27
stripping of source
information 27–8
mailing lists 157–9, 202
addresses 159–60
advertising on 177–8
anonymous messages 177
apologies 178–9
archives 112, 164, 197
and attachments 177
complaints procedure 180–81
corrections 173–6
courtesy 173–6
crackpots on 180–81
cross–posting 172–3, 199
digests 160, 199
dormancy 158, 200
errors of fact 174–6
nding 159
language 163–4
list–owners 158, 201
list–servers 159, 201
lurking 164, 202
moderators 158–9, 161–2, 180–81, 202, 205
names 158
and out–of–o ce messages 178
posts 158, 162, 164, 203
private discussions 166–7
protocol 161–4, 203
replies to questions 169–72
reply option 169–70
submitting questions 167–8
subscribing to 159–61
summaries 171–2, 205
things to avoid 173–8
threads 164–7, 177, 205
unsubscribing 178
user guidelines 159, 161–2
major–domo: see list-servers
manners 50
measurements 10–11
Microsoft software 101
mistaken beliefs about email 12–13
mistakes, importance of checking for 11
modems 17–18, 202
moderated lists 159, 162, 202
moderators 158–9, 161–2, 180–81, 202, 205
names
English 47–8
failure to sign 5
rst 21, 47–9
non–English 47
in signatures 25–6
surnames 21–2, 48
writing about 90
netiquette 2, 13, 25, 50, 67, 151–3, 154, 202
Netscape Navigator 18
newsreaders 182–3, 203
newsgroups 181, 203
distribution options 184–5
hierarchy 181–2, 201
informality 183
listings 182
lurking 184, 185, 202
newsreaders 182–3, 203
postings 203
protocol 184
threads 183, 205
tolerance 185
Northanger Abbey(Austen) 119

o ence, care to avoid 10

online 203
OTOH (on the other hand) 65
out–of–o ce messages 178, 205
ownership of emails 189

paragraphing 54–5
pasting 57, 199
personality, no place for in email 23
plainprimary 45–6, 203
point, getting to the 58–9
political viewpoints 30
pomposity 69–71
pop–up windows 51
preferences 24, 139, 203
printing 188
privacy 186–9
pronouns, use of 4
proofreading 11, 35–6, 75–7
punctuation 54
citing email addresses 96
citing URLs 95–6
in instructions 97

questions
acknowledgements 130, 133
approach 114–16
clarity 120–27
content 120–27
conprimary 125–27
country of origin 131–2
homework 129–31
information sources 109–12
to mailing lists 167–8
multiple 127–8
quick replies 128–9
related 127
subject lines 43, 114–15, 116–19, 168, 203
who to ask 112–16

racist content 188

Re 44, 137, 139, 203
religious beliefs 30
replies 203
50 per cent rule 148
address lines 137–8
angle brackets in 140–42, 145, 147, 197
clarity 148–51
content 142–51
conprimary 142–3
 decision to reply 135–7
deleting unwanted material 143, 145, 147
introductions 148
location of signature 142
to mailing list questions 169–72
original message 140–43, 145–8
quoted passages 145–8
Re 44, 137, 139, 203
Reply button 137, 138
structure 145–8
subject lines 137–9
top posting 144
via pop–up windows 51
reply window 137–40
requests (Req) 43, 203
researching questions 109–12
reversed angle brackets (><), as emphasis marks 86–7
RichPrimary 103, 204
ROTFL (rolling on the oor laughing) 98
RSN (real soon now) 65
RTFM (read the [censored] manual) 177

salutations 46–7, 204

business emails 50
names 47–9
noncommittal 49
omitting 50
titles 48
sarcasm 10
scrolling 55
search engines 18–19, 110–11, 119, 204
sentences, spaces between 57
sexual content 188
shared email addresses 30
Sherwood, Kaitlin Duck 124
short forms, use of 63
signature option 26–7
signatures 204
advantage of 27, 62
business contact details 28–9
choice of 26–7
 decoration of 29–30
inclusion of email address 27–8
location in replies 142
and political and religious beliefs 30
style of 25–6
use of full name 25–6
use of initials in 25
single quotes 87, 89, 90
slang 9
smileys 91–3, 204
snail mail 204
snip 145, 204
software, and attachment compatibility 101–3
sound e ects 107–8
spam (junk mail) 139, 204
and algebraic usernames 21
identi cation of 21, 22, 39–40
use of Re 44
special characters
ASCII characters 80–82
control characters 57, 82–3, 199
extended ASCII 83, 200
Unicode 81–2, 205
spellcheckers 76
spelling 54, 76
spoilers 184
spoof messages 136–7, 177
standard English 52–3
style
appropriate choice of 1–6
breeziness 71–2
casual 3, 4, 70
enumeration 60–62
formal 3, 4
informal 4–7
pomposity 69–71
simplicity of 70–71
sti 3
primary messaging 66
wordiness 71–2
subject lines 204
 blank 38–9
capitalization 39
clarity 116–19
comments 43
con dential messages 44–5
content 41–5
coyness 42–3
deletion based on 39–40
FYI (for your information) 43–4, 200
in headers 134–5
importance of rst words 41–2
importance of good content 38–41
length 41–3
misuse of 73–4
questions (Q) 43, 114–15, 116–19, 168, 203
Re 44, 137, 139, 203
replies 137–9
requests (Req) 43, 203
resending bounced messages 36
summaries 171, 204–5
threads 165–6
uninformative 39
use of [long] 43, 202
use of urgent 39–40
subscripts 85
summaries 171, 204–5
summarization 62
superscripts 85
surnames 21–2, 48

Tab key 56
technical questions 6
telephone calls 34
telephone sockets 17–18
threads 164–7, 177, 183, 205
TIA (thanks in advance) 65
time saving, false economy of 7–8, 77, 123
time zones 11, 49
titles 48
titles of works 87–8
top posting 144
triviality 34
Turkish 84
typefaces 22–3, 205
typing instructions 96–8
typos 75–6

underscores, as substitute for italics 87

Unicode 81–2, 205
United States of America, libel laws 190–92
unmoderated lists 158–9, 205
unreadable messages 23
URLs 28–9, 93–6, 205
Usenet182
usernames 205
algebraic 20–21
at–sign (@) 198
choice of 19–22
cutesy 22
ISP restrictions on choice 19
surnames in 21–2
use of forename only 21

vacation messages 178, 205

verbal communication 3–4
Vespucci, Amerigo 118–19
viruses 106, 107, 205–6
vocabulary 52–3
vulgarity 72–3

web addresses (URLs) 28–9, 93–6, 205

word processors 46, 57
words, writing about 88–90
work, personal emails and 8
World Wide Web 110–12, 206
wraps 23, 56, 206
writing, problems 3–4

Yahoo! 18
YMMV (your mileage may vary) 66