Internet Tips & Tricks
By MARK DAVIS
General Manager, CommSpeed Internet Service
Vice
President, Prescott Computer Society
Visit the Computer Society Website
www.prescottcomputersociety.org
Email Etiquette
The
7 tips outlined here will lead you to more courteous
communication when you send email messages.
1.
Use a short, descriptive subject line. Use words that
will describe the general purpose of your e-mail.
2. ONE OF THE BIGGEST
MISTAKES PEOPLE MAKE IS TYPING THEIR MESSAGE IN
ALL-CAPS. It's okay to use all-caps for headings or
titles in your messages, or even to EMPHASIZE certain
words. Anything beyond that is equivalent to shouting
at someone.
3. Respect people's
privacy. When sending a message to multiple recipients,
put all the addresses in the "BCC: field" (blind carbon
copy) separated with semi-colons. This way each
recipient will only be able to see his/her own e-mail
address.
4. Use blank lines
(hard carriage returns) to separate your paragraphs. In
most emails, paragraphs are not indented because
different e-mail programs can show tab stops differently
onscreen. If you need to indent something, use the
space-bar.
5. While e-mail might
be viewed as an informal means of communication, your
composition skills are still quite reflective of your
knowledge and abilities. A few typos are acceptable,
but if you are consistently spelling words incorrectly,
using bad grammar and so on, you risk being thought of
as a less than intelligent person.
6. Nobody likes
reading run-on sentences because they're not very easy
to read, and besides, readers’ brains might get tired of
thinking about the words by the time their eyes finish
with the sentence a few minutes later before having to
move on to the next sentence, which might be part of a
bigger paragraph that seems to be lumped together
without any signs of visible separation.
7. When sending large attachments, get approval from
the recipient first. If they have a slower connection
it could take an extremely long time to download. And if
their mail box is near its capacity, large attachments
can overload it and keep them from receiving other
e-mail messages.
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