While email is great for many things, it isn’t really well suited for the composition of lengthy messages. Unlike Word (or any other modern word processing program) email isn’t designed to automatically wrap text to the next line and keep each of them a readable length. Instead it just keeps going until it reaches the right end of your screen, the window you have open, or until you hit “enter” and start a new paragraph. As more and more of us work on larger and larger monitors this means that lines of text get longer and harder to follow. Because of this-- and because you can never be sure what email client people are using to read your message-- there’s really no way to know what the message is going to look like when it reaches the other end. Depending on whether your readers are set up to receive mail in HTML, Rich Text or plain ol’ Plain Text, all of your fancy formatting and the images you’ve included might not even show up.
Do your readers a favor and compose long messages with lots of text and formatting in your word processor and attach them to your email. Not only will they be easier to read but you can make use of the far superior tools included with the word processor to refine your document and make it more accurate and attractive. You’ll also save yourself some of the heartache that comes when you’ve been working on a long email, the program crashes and you lose all your work. I can’t tell you how many attorneys I’ve worked with who have lost hours of work this way and expect to be able to retrieve text that’s now long gone. Word processors do a far superior job of automatically saving documents as you work and recovering them when you crash—though you should still make the effort to hit that “save” button occasionally.
I know, it’s a lot of effort.
No comments:
Post a Comment