Gombi Guide Email
I knew someone who started all his communications, even letters, with
Good Morning, Geoff ... I used to find it odd because he neither wrote
them nor did I receive them, in the morning! Still, better than Hi?
[Makes some of us cringe!]
I have taught for years that a greeting is not necessary in formal or
business communications when you use a heading, and particularly
when your letter is addressed to an anonymous person in an
organisation. [See the Gombi Guide Writing Difficult Letters.]
Consequently, I tend not to use greetings, finding them to be
superfluous. However, when replying to someone who has called me by
name, I tend to use their name in the body of the reply:
Thanks, Maud, for your generosity in leaving me half your estate .......
The Message
Most email programs used to be strictly text only - letters, numbers and
keyboard punctuation marks - without any of the formatting you are used
to being able to use in wordprocessing. However, this has now changed
and you can usually make your text underlined, bold etc without too
much trouble.
The length of a message might not seem important if you don't get
much mail, but for people who receive a lot of email, there may not be
time to read long messages, so keep it short. Unformatted text is not
particularly easy to read on screen, so your chances of someone
reading your whole message are better if you keep it as concise as
possible. If you need to write a long message, flag it in the subject line
of the message, eg, Why You Should Change Your Will (long). This way,
Aunt Maud will know that it's a long message and can decide whether
she has time to read it immediately.
______________________________________
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