would speak to your friend. You might forget to use proper grammar or spelling.Tracy Phelps
SLM 521
March 16, 2006
Elective 7: email
E7email
Email - Effective Communication Tips
The following list will guide your email compositions and responses to others. These ideas are taken from the article by Kaitlin Duck Sherwood entitled
A Beginner’s Guide to Effective Email located at http://www.webfoot.com/advice/email.top.html#intro and last visited on March 18, 2005. This document is designed for upper elementary aged (grades 3 - 5) students.1. You need to be aware of when you can be sloppy and when you have to be careful.
If you are writing and sending your final copy of a report or a piece of writing, you should be more careful with your spelling, punctuation, and grammar. If you are writing an email to a friend to see if he wants to spend the night at your house this weekend, you can write the email as you would speak to your friend. You might forget to use proper grammar or spelling.
2. Email also does not convey emotions nearly as well as face-to-face or even telephone conversations.
Remember the reader of your email cannot tell if you are serious or joking. When writing, you can’t change the voice of your words like you can when you speak, so it is important that your meaning is clear to the reader.
3. The way your message looks may be quite different by the time it gets to someone else's screen.
Formatting your email by adding a different font, color, pictures, or backgrounds may look pretty on your computer. Not everyone has the same computer or the same software, so keep it simple. By the time your message gets to another computer, it may be jumbled and messy looking if they have a different software package than you!
4. Give useful subject lines.
By giving the reader a descriptive subject line, he or she knows what you are talking about before even opening your message. This allows the reader to get his or her mind ready to understand your message.
5. Avoid using pronouns in the first three lines.
Be specific in your message. When senders use pronouns (he, she, it, they) the message is unclear and the reader might have to reread the message that he sent you to understand what you’re talking about.
6. Quote the previous message.
If you are answering a message, quote from the message so that your reader knows exactly what he wrote to you and what you are answering.
7. Keep everything short.
If everything (lines, paragraph, message) is short, the reader will be sure to read your whole message and will understand what you are talking about. Peo
ple are busy, they don’t have time to read more than a few lines per email.
8. Expressing emotion in a short message is difficult. You can use a number of tricks with the text to help convey the emotion:
Asterisks (for emphasis)
Punctuation
White space
Lower-case letters
9. Capitals are yelling.
Unless you are very angry, avoid typing in all capital letters. Using all capitals is understood as yelling.
10. Remember to type in
http:// before your URLs and remember that punctuation doesn't mix well with URLs.Sometimes if someone forgets the http:// before their URL, the email software program will not make it an active link so the user cannot access the link. In addition, if you are typing a URL, pay attention to where the punctuation for the sentences falls. If it is near the URL, the user might think that the period is part of the URL and when typed incorrectly, the URL will not work.
All clip art is from artbycheryl.com
http://www.artbycheryl.com/faces_children_01.html