I recently asked people to send me their pet peeves with regard to emails. My pet peeve was — and is — people who don’t put their phone numbers on their emails. Several BizWritingTip readers supported me. Marina H. went one step further. Her peeve was people who not include the extension, forcing people to […]
Emails have only been an official tool of the workplace since the mid 90s. However, the media philosopher Marshall McLuhan seemed to be referring to them in the 60s when he said, “We shape the tools and they in turn shape us.” Emails were designed to make us more productive. We can send and receive […]
We are all familiar with letters. They are a traditional form of communications. However, emails are recently new to the business scene and require their own email-centric form of writing and organizing. Why? Emails were never designed to be a formal method of communication. When emails came into being in the early 90s, they were […]
Gillian’s question: “I am wondering about including the reason for your absence in an out-of-office message if it is of a personal nature other than vacation. Do you require a reason such as a death in the family, medical or maternity leave? Is it fair or acceptable to say ‘… for personal reasons …’?” BizWritingTip […]
How do people read letters and emails? Remember today’s readers are skimmers, and they want key information quickly. They also try to quickly prioritize a message to determine how much time they need to spend on it.??Because letters have been around so long, people are familiar with their layout. Busy people tend to read the […]
Karen’s question: “I receive numerous emails daily from staff and other community contacts who end their messages with ‘cheers’ or ‘thanks much.’ Whatever happened to closing with ‘sincerely’ or a simple ‘thank you’? What is the appropriate way of ending an internal email or one received by a fellow service worker from outside your business?” BizWritingTip response: […]