Loud and clear

Let’s face it, email is an accident. It’s as if a business letter went on a blind date with a private phone call, drank a little too much, one thing led to another and… Yes, well, you get the picture.

Unsurprisingly, then, as the offspring of this romantic entanglement, email is half documentation, half conversation. So before you click ‘send’, you’d better read it aloud.

For email is not about keyboard skills. True, if you meant to write, ‘Hello Jim, are those figures ready yet?’ but in your haste missed the ‘o’ off hello, you may be in the soup with Jim. But what really matters is how you sound, not how you spell. Never mind the typos, get the tone right.

So, before you go rattling off your next email, ask yourself: does this sound:

Too familiar? ‘Dear’ is always safe, ‘Hi’ a little chummier, ‘Hiya’ a bit too jaunty and ‘Yo!’ completely off the map. ‘Well done’ – yes. ‘Way to go!’ – no. ‘How’s it going?’ – fine. ‘How’s it hanging?’ – well, you don’t need me to explain. Aim for a register e-writing guru Dianna Booher calls ‘business casual’.

Too stuffy? As well as killing off the usual suspects – longwinded noun phrases (bores) and passives (cowards) – also steer clear of discourse markers of more than two syllables – ‘Plus’ rather than ‘Moreover’.

Too nice? Politeness (depending on how you say it) can sound like sarcasm. So skip the likes of ‘Would you mind’, ‘Thank you so much’, ‘If it’s not too much trouble’, ‘Excuse me for asking’ and ‘Please explain’. ‘Please’ in particular is a devious little word. We’re taught to use it liberally, but in print it always sounds snooty.

Think of email as another kind of voicemail and all you have to do is find the right voice.