By Harvey Gardner


Do your email messages portray you as a competent professional or an insensitive ignoramus?

Email communicates at the speed of light. But along with our quest for speed and efficiency, we also should eliminate bad grammar, misspelled words, sloppy writing, and rudeness.

When we write notes, memos, and letters for email, they paint a picture of us, often to a total stranger who only knows us by our email.

Many of us—I suspect most of us—now make many initial contacts using email.  If we want maximum results from our online networking, it behooves us to take the time to write the very best messages we can.

Here are a few suggestions to energize your email and make a more favorable impression:

• Write a subject line that accurately describes the content of your message.  Avoid all capital letters, exclamation points, and symbols, because they may indicate SPAM.

• Use the person’s name to start your letter.  A person’s name is to them the most important word in the language, if it’s spelled correctly.  And . . . it makes a good impression and almost always gets your message read.

• Don’t send other people’s email addresses when forwarding email.  Take a moment to delete those multiple email addresses, if you receive them from other people.  It’s the right thing to do.

• Use your spell-check feature on your email.  Nothing is worse than misspelled words.

• Write complete coherent sentences.

• Write short paragraphs on a single subject.

• Don’t abbreviate words.  Spell them out.  It’s too easy to misinterpret abbreviations, and some people may not know what they mean.  If you use the term several times in your letter, spell it out the first time, followed by the abbreviation in parentheses, then use the abbreviation in the rest of the letter.

• Select the most accurate words possible.  I recently received a letter that asked me “to contribute,” but what she meant was “to participate,” which I was happy to do, but I thought she was asking me to send money,.  No way!

• Choose descriptive nouns and verbs.  If you use accurate nouns and verbs, you’ll eliminate the need for most adjectives and adverbs.

• Minimize adjectives and adverbs.

• Keep your messages short.

• Set aside time to write a portfolio of messages that you can polish into masterpieces and keep on file.  Then later, with a bit of personalization and customization, you can turn them into effective email messages you can send quickly, and that will set you apart as a master communicator.