The Idjits Guide To Email
Judging by my students, many don't realize that email is still the most common way of communicating professionally. In my own job I field a couple dozen work related emails every day, haven't spoken to a work colleague on the phone about work stuff in years (over a decade), have never received a work related text, and rarely touch a piece of department-related paper.
On the surface, writing a guide to sending email seems a lot like writing a guide to breathing...or talking on the cell phone. But if you've ever stood on a street corner and watched someone in an SUV sitting at a red light, chatting away on her cell phone, and then you've watched her simply drive through the red light, without ever looking either way, her mind clearly one hundred miles away...well, then you can guess what kinds of terrible emails people send.
So here are the bare bones basics of sending professional emails.
1) The subject line: use it! And use it to, yep, you guessed it, tell the reader the subject of your text, otherwise he or she may never bother reading your email.
If, for example, your subject line reads "hey" or "hello", but the actual content of your email is a question you need me to answer before, say, class tomorrow, I may simply read the subject line and decide that I don't have the time to randomly chat with you over nothing. However, I probably did have time to answer your question.
If you really want me to answer that question by a certain time, the subject line is the place to state that.
2) Your name: use it! Many people, including UI students, have either a code like "ubozo2345@vandals.edu" etc.) or a hotmail alias (hotbottombabe@hotmail.com or drunkenidjit@yahoo.com), and these people -- especially the ones that are drunkenidjits -- tend to leave their name out of the email text. In which case the reader has no clue who you are.
And momma always told me not to talk to strangers. ITS frequently tells us the same thing. So, in short, if I don't know you who are, we aren't really communicating, are we?
Oh yeah, and do you really want to write to your boss or professor with an email tag "hotbottombabe"? Wait, don't answer that.
3) Attachments: use them sometimes. Do not send as an attachment something that doesn't need to be an attachment; the reader would much rather just read what you wanted him to read instead of waiting for Word to open up. Or, quite often, not open up because you sent it using a program his computer does not operate.
4) Attachments: tell us it was attached. People screw up attachments all the time: attaching the wrong thing or simply forgetting to attach them. The reader often doesn't know you screwed up, however, because how the heck would they know you meant to attach something unless you tell them?
So, tell them. Something like this works: "Hey, I attached that letter as a Word document. Let me know if you can't open it."
Note here the telling them how it was attached. Not everyone has the latest software you have and often they can't open what you sent them. Help them out.
5) It's writing: use what you've learned. Every year I spend an entire semester explaining the basic elements of professional writing (you attitude, good will, editing for completeness etc.), only to receive emails from the students in those classes entirely devoid of those elements. These people clearly haven't learned a damn thing about writing or getting what they want.
6) Use CC (carbon copies) for all group oriented correspondence. If you write, for example, an assigned email to your professor on behalf of your group, that email also belongs to your group, so make sure everyone gets a copy of it. This type of transparency will save you much time later explaining things to the group members and, perhaps more importantly, it builds cohesiveness -- in terms of both information flow and also trust and community -- in the group. Most importantly, it will save you and your group much time.
7) Acknowledge reception and say Thank You. Even with all the attention to computer programming these days, I still send emails to people who never get them. A week later I'm left assuming they hate me, and when I finally write and ask "did you get that email" they say "nope." I check my "Sent" files and there it is: it says I sent it. They check their inbox. Nope; they never got it. Who knows where they go -- probably someplace drinking a cold one with my missing sox.
More commonly, however, I accidentally delete something I thought I was going to send. Or perhaps you deleted it accidentally, or perhaps your computer mistook it for spam and so on.
So here's a simple trick: when someone replies to your email, even if there's no reason for you to write back, just shoot them a two word response: "Thank you!" In some cultures, this is also called "being polite."