A whole book about sending email
I’ve been using email for years and I never realized that an entire book could be devoted to the subject. This is the result of the usual human trait of dismissing things that are very familiar. In fact, email has enough of its own particular quirks and characteristics that a book is readily justified and one has now been provided. David Shipley (deputy editor of the New York Times editorial page) and Will Schwalbe (editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books) have written a 247 page book called Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. Today’s (Sunday) New York Times has a review by Dave Barry . Barry is a humorist by profession and provides some amusing observations of his own about email. I’ll leave it to you to enjoy those by reading the review but here are some comments Barry makes about the book:
In “Send,†Shipley and Schwalbe describe in detail the alarming array of ways you can botch e-mail even before you start writing the message. These include using a misleading or meaningless subject (“Re: Re: Re:â€); addressing the e-mail to the wrong recipients, or too many of them; putting somebody in the “To†list who should be a “Cc†or vice versa; and misusing the sneaky “Bcc†and “Forward†commands, which can easily cause a confidential message to become very public indeed.
Barry also notes:
After discussing the many ways you can go wrong simply addressing your e-mail, Shipley and Schwalbe discuss, at length, the dos and don’ts of composing the body of the text — figuring out what your message really is, then deciding how to begin, how to end, what tone to take, what to say and what not to say. Much of their advice would apply equally well to old-fashioned letters; it’s common sense, mingled with some basic principles of etiquette and grammar. But the authors present this advice concisely and often amusingly, with real-life examples of e-mail gone bad. There are also lots of helpful lists, such as “Six Reasons to Send a Letter Instead of an E-Mail†“Five Words That Almost Everyone Misuses,†“Three Absolute Rules of Responding,†and “Five Ways to Apologize for an Inexcusably Tardy E-Mail Reply.â€
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