I’ve written on and off about email’s (few) pros, (mostly) cons and dangers.

Yesterday, I had an interaction I thought was worth passing on, especially since many people no longer give much thought to capitalizing or punctuation.

By request, I sent the link of a specific post to some people I know. However, because my email server was messed up my mail was badly delayed, so I didn’t receive the separate request from one of them for that same URL until the next morning. When I complied with the request, I received this response.

‘yup. I got it yesterday, actually. it’s a good read.’

Three points

• Many very good writers (such as this one) don’t always capitalize in casual correspondence.
• For reasons unknown or understood (at least by me) email fonts are often very small.
• Casual emails, such as this, are scanned more often than read.

As I told her in my response, at first glance, the period after ‘actually’ looked like a comma, especially since the ‘I’ in ‘it’s’ wasn’t capitalized; and that completely changed the meaning of what she had written.

Her response, ‘boy, is that ever true. changes the meaning ENTIRELY! and insults someone into the bargain…’

‘Email’ and ‘clear communications’ are almost an oxymoron and you don’t want to make it worse than it already is.

Think about it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Business info, Communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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