Chapter 6: Electronic Written Communication
Learning Objectives
1. Identify characteristics of effective professional emails.
2. Plan, write, revise, and edit short documents and messages that are organized, complete, and tailored to specific audiences.
- Format and write documents and messages such as emails.
Electronic mail, widely known as “e-mail” or just “email,” is by volume the most popular written communication channel in the history of human civilization. With emails being so cheap and easy to send on desktop and laptop computers, as well as on mobile phones and tablets, a staggering 280 billion emails are sent globally per day (Radicati, 2017)—that’s over a hundred trillion per year. Most are for business purposes because email is such a flexible channel ideal for anything from short, routine information shares, requests, and responses the length of a text, to important formal messages delivering the content that letters and memos used to handle. Its ability to send a message to one person or as many people as you have addresses for, integrate with calendars for scheduling meetings and events, send document attachments, and send automatic replies makes it the most versatile communication channel in the workplace.
This mindboggling quantity of 3.2 million emails sent per second doesn’t necessarily mean that quality is a non-issue for email, however. Because it has, to some extent, replaced mailed letters for formal correspondence, emails related to important occasions such as applying for and maintaining employment must be impeccably well written. Your email represents you in your physical absence, as well as the company you work for if that’s the case, so it must be both good (well-written) and appropriate.
First, ensure that you really need an email to represent you because emailing merely to avoid speaking in person or calling by phone can do more harm than good (see §2.3, especially Table 2.3, above on channel selection). If an email is necessary, however, then it must be good. As people who make decisions about your livelihood, the employers and clients you email can be highly judgmental about the quality of your writing. To them it’s an indication of your professionalism, attention to detail, education, and even intelligence. The writing quality in a single important email can be the difference between getting hired and getting fired or remaining unemployed.
Let’s say, for instance, that you get an email from a customer and they mention in it that they’ve been shopping around for a company to do a custom job for them. This means they’re emailing other companies with the same inquiry. Let’s say also that your competitors offer similar services at similar prices and are similarly reviewed positively online. Tough choice for the customer. With everything else being equal, the quality of the email responses may be the deciding factor. Responding to the customer quickly gives you an advantage because you show them that you can get thing