AB: All-Round Nice Guy

Email - love it or hate it, it’s ingrained into our personal and business lives - the communication tool of choice for many small businesses, due to its speed, reach, and universal appeal.

Email has changed the way we write our business communications. Compared to typically quite formal written documents, an email allows us to be a little more personal - a little more humanistic in our language - after all, we’ve gone from a turnaround of a few days for snail mail to a few seconds for email.

But even though the humble email has only been in existence for 10 or more years, it has already begun to change again, this time into something even more casual and - worse still - something that often fails to do what it is meant to do - to get a clear and concise message through to its recipient.

The following is a refresher on good email ettiquette, good email habits, and good formatting tips for writing emails with clarity and punch.

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ONE FONT, ONE SIZE, ONE COLOUR: THE PLAIN TEXT EMAIL

Graphic artists often enjoy the challenge of working with a limited colour pallette because it forces them to use other graphic ‘tools’ to get a clear message through. It’s not unlike the fact that a black and white photo distills the vibrancy and life of a colour photo down into a more stark and revealing image.

As a general rule, use plain text emails rather than HTML (or rich-text) emails - yes, they don’t look as good, no, you can’t change the font nor the size nor the colour - BUT the plain text email can be read by anyone, anywhere, anytime. HTML emails (the type you get that can look like full-blown web sites) can differ slightly in formatting from end user to end user, no matter how careful you plan them. Indeed, with the new Outlook 2007 coming soon, HTML emails will be taking a giant step *backwards* in how they’re displayed - ouch.

On the more positive side, with a few simple tricks, you can make plain text emails highly readable:

- Use lots of line breaks

Vertical space is probably the only thing you have an abundance of when writing plain text emails - you can always add in extra blank lines to space out paragraphs, or add double or triple blank lines between paragraphs. So perhaps rather than keeping sentences together (like this one is), use more space, and make more lines between paragraphs.

Like this. It may be less that proper punctuation, but it separates your thoughts, so that your recipient can also unerstand them better.

- Showing emphasis

So, with plain text emails, bold is gone, yeah? The solution is an old ‘internet trick’ direct from the chat rooms: place *asterisks* around things that you would have previously made *bold*. See? It’s just a convention, and like all conventions, it was probably an arbitrary choice a *long* time ago - but once you get know it, it becomes second nature.

This is probably a good time to mention one other vital internet convention - THAT OF USING ALL CAPITALS. For the uninitiated, it’s considered the equivlent of ’shouting’ at someone through an email, and as such, is considered bad email ettiquette. Bad form. If you happen to type an email with the caps lock key left on, don’t panic - most people will realise! And of course, since the internet is so huge, you will easily find some people advocating banning the caps lock key altogether.

- Make up a ’style’ for headings and subheadings

OK - some lateral thinking here - when you only have one font to use, you quickly find new characters that you rarely use elsewhere. Make use of some of these rare finds, and create a recurring theme for typing headings. It’s not hard - I think I use the basic one for all my plain text emails:

THIS IS A HEADING WITH HYPHENS UNDERNEATH
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Not hard - but you really can visually separate different topics with a decent heading. Also explore the tilde (~) character, found to the left of the exclamation point, above your number 1 key. The humble asterisk (*) also works well for headings, plus the ‘hat’ symbol above the number 6 (^).

- Bullet lists

Creating a list of items in a word processing program will most likely bring up a series of bullets points (•). In plain text email, you can still use the bullet point (hold down the option key and type a number 8 if you’re on a Mac!), but most likely, you can simply use a series of hyphens or dashes, depending on which side of the tracks you grew up on.

- Use consistent spaces before and after the hyphen or bullet point
- And if you really are going to type a super-long line, eg: the quick
brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs, then feel free to go back and break
the long bullet point into separate lines, each with the same consistent
spaces before the new line. It realy does help with readability.

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A QUICK RUNDOWN OF GOOD EMAIL ETTIQUETTE

- Subject lines

Keep them on target - don’t reuse the same old subject line from 6 weeks ago when replying to an old email - make sure you change the subject line of *any* email to a decent summary of the contents. There’s nothing worse than scanning email after email from someone, all with the exact same subject line - there’s no reference to the contents of the email, only a date to assist you. I guess then it goes without saying that you *realy do need* to put in a subject line - even for the quickest email, I often write the email *in* the subject line, then just copy and paste it into the body of the email as a backup!

- Replying

Be judicious when replying to an email - especially if you re-quote the previous in back in the new reply - as you know, you can quickly get into a multi-level reply to a reply to a reply. Not fun. Be brave, and only re-quote one specific paragraph maximum when replying, or better yet, start a fresh email! oooh, controversial, I know!

- Email signatures

Everyone needs one - it’s the last couple of lines of any email that should always provide some basic contact points, and if you like, something memorable that promotes a smile. Even smarter, though, is to plan ahead a little bit, and also include your ’standard signoff’ in the signature, so that all you have to do is end your email content, and then your email signature automatically adds a few extra blank lines, signs off for you, and then gives your standard blurb about you. Oh, look - here it is now!

AB out

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Andrew Ballard is the owner of ReBusiness.com.au, a marketing/IT/design consultancy based in Drysdale. This article comes from his blog for small business owners: allroundniceguy.com