E-mail Body Language

Tips For Improving Your Interpersonal E-Mail Skills

I have received some emails that use poor email manners. I asked Bob Patterson for some rules that everyone should use when writing emails. His comments are below. Thanks Bob.

The e-mail messages you send may be saying a lot more about you than you realize. They provide a window into your workplace status, work habits, stress levels and even your personality. Here are some pointers to consider:

1. Never use e-mail to ‘let off steam’. Save your immediate wrath or criticism for face-to-face meetings or to the phone. Better to take a deep breath, go and get a coffee and wait a day. Delays will help you preserve relationships and demonstrate emotional maturity.
2. Set a ‘ 5 or 10 minute don’t send rule’ for most e-mail. Instead, save them in your ‘drafts’ folder-you’ll be surprised how given a five minute lapse you will be able to retract a poorly written message or reconsider your response to something important.
3. It’s OK to inject some humor into your messages, but frequent ‘emoticons’, ‘chain’ jokes/pictures and smiley faces says that you are underemployed and not to be taken seriously.
4. Language matters! Use spell-check and your thesaurus. Mangled sentences and typos make you appear careless or even just plain ignorant.
5. Be considerate, polite and brief in all messaging: trim dangling threads; eschew unnecessary attachments, signature graphics, run-on disclaimers, device identifiers, html coding, cute quotes and icons – especially dancing icons.
6. Dnt ovrabbrvt.
7. Don’t cry wolf with alert levels.
8. Use cc with restraint.
9. When sending an E-mail to a long recipient list, code as group address for brevity and privacy.
10. ALL CAPS IS FOR SHOUTING!

Priority has developed training programs that will help develop interpersonal e-mail skills for both individuals and teams.

To Your Success!

Ron Finklestein
Small Business Success Expert
Info@yourbusinesscoach.net
330-990-0788