How To Write Effective Emails - R.L. Trask
How To Write Effective Emails - R.L. Trask
How To Write Effective Emails - R.L. Trask
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ISBN: 978-0-14-193669-7
For my wonderful Jan
Contents
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Index
Acknowledgements
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.
1.7 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:
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]
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.
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
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
URL: http://www.hobsbaum.co.uk/html
Chapter summary:
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.
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. Sylvia
4. j.w.noble Re: No
primitive
languages
5. Jason Hello!
7. jgw24gg17h8 new
invesment
oppertunitys
9. Stan.Friedman Request to
write a
chapter
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, 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
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
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.
Chapter summary:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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*?
in an emergency in an
situation emergency
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.
I need to copy an article from _Scienti c American_. Can anybody tell me where I can
nd one?
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.
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.
FLAME OFF
Chapter summary:
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’).
5.4 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
<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].
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.)
5.10 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:
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.
6.8 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:
(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.
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
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?
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?
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?
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.
7.8 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.
Chapter summary:
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:
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.
Richard,
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.
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.
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.
[snip]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
8.8 FORWARDING
Chapter summary:
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 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:
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:
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.’
9.10 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.
Chapter summary:
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.
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
gibberish 46
Google 18
grammar 54
Great Britain, libel laws 190–92
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
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
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
Yahoo! 18
YMMV (your mileage may vary) 66