Because we compose, send and respond to email so quickly, it is generally treated as a casual means of communication. As I suggested earlier, it’s more like a phone call than a formal business letter and it’s not very well suited for “serious” discussions because of a variety of issues ranging from the difficulty of capturing the right tone to our inability to secure our messages. But that doesn’t mean that email is an “anything goes” format or that we should all be using instant messaging style shortcuts to save precious keystrokes. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, I have to admit that I believe that all but the very most casual of our business emails should contain at least an approximation of proper punctuation and be written in complete sentences. If the point of email is to communicate, you can’t risk being misunderstood or forcing your correspondents to pull up an instant messaging glossary so they can figure out what your acronyms mean. Are you really saving time if you’re confusing people?
A group of people in one of my classes asked me what “EOM” meant, and I had to admit that I had no idea. Apparently one of their attorneys was signing off on all of his email with “EOM,” which was confusing people because those weren’t his initials. Since I had the computer right there in front of me I did a quick search and found that he must have intended this to mean “End of Message,” which is apparently something that is recommended to email writers so that their recipients know when the body of the text is done and that they don’t have to keep scrolling through the signatures, disclaimers and previous messages that might be attached. Not a bad idea-- as long as your readers know what it means. None of his, not even his secretary, had any idea.
One senior executive I know telegraphs all of his messages, condensing everything in his emails to a bare minimum-- nothing is ever capitalized, and punctuation is often limited to dashes that break up separate ideas. He also makes liberal use of what seem to be personally developed acronyms and abbreviations and the resulting messages often look more like a jumble of text than coherent thoughts until you take the time to sort out what it means. Of course, the reason he can get away with this is that he’s important enough that people are going to go to the effort of figuring it out. I know there are probably some of you out there who are offended that there are people (and emails) that are more important than others. But come on! No one would bother trying to decipher what I had to say if I wrote like that, except maybe the few unfortunate people I supervise and who feel like it’s their job to try to understand me.
Which brings me to an interesting phenomenon I’ve observed. Over time, people who work for sloppy writers start thinking that it’s acceptable for them to write the same way. You start to see entire working groups and whole offices that seem to have lost the ability to use their shift keys or end a sentence with a period. My advice to you is not to fall into this trap. Unless you’re way up there on that totem pole people aren’t going to give you the same sort of latitude or put the same amount of effort into figuring out what it is that you have to say. Worse, they may just give up trying.
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