Tips for Good E-mail Writing

A good deal of communication takes place in the form of emails that you write to friends, colleagues and clients. In personal or professional communication through emails, you need to carefully follow certain guidelines that will help you write good mails while maintaining the etiquette of email communication.

• When sending a mail to a new email address, send a test mail first. Most of the time, errors in spelling can bounce the mail right back into your inbox.

• State the subject of your mail rather than leaving it empty. This enables easy search and retrieval of mails from a rather crowded inbox. Gmail has launched a feature called Inbox Preview that allows you to glimpse the first line of your recently received mails.

• Use the original mail thread while replying to a previous mail so that the receiver can also track the correspondence in case of any confusion.

• Customise your email by addressing the person. If at all you need to send the same mail to several people use the correct form of address and send it using the Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) option. But don’t use the Cc (carbon copy) option unless it is necessary.

• Be precise and to the point. Use simple sentences to convey your message. A long mail is hard to read and remember especially for a person who receives quite a lot of mails a day.

• Write about a single topic in a mail rather than bombarding a single mail with a lot of information thereby helping the receiver to answer the relevant topic correctly.

• Delete the list of previous receivers while forwarding a mail so that you do not reveal a big list of addresses of people without their permission.

• Always remember that the web is a not secure enough to hold all your private details. Think twice before sending that angry e-mail or before revealing that extremely private piece of information in an email.
  

• Sound positive and energetic in your mails rather than depressed and drab.

• Re-read and edit the mail you have written, carefully going over the written matter for mistakes in grammar, punctuation or spelling.

• Using capital letters in mails is not advisable as such writing is considered as screaming in the internet lingo.

• Use the formatting tools but remember that the receiver may not be able to view the formatting. Take care about sending rich text to people who can view the message only in the plain text format.

• Don’t forward chain letters that are scary or superstitious.
  

• Don’t reply to spams either.

• Reply to important mails immediately possibly on the same day or the next rather than mulling over them for days together.