Comments on: The power of Email: Friend or Foe

By: Community Building Blog

Community Building Blog — Thu, 24 May 2007 16:26:15 +0000

It is so easy to pay less attention to detail when it comes to emails. Something about the online world makes us naturally lazy, I think!

- Martin Reed

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 23 May 2007 21:38:42 +0000

Not sure Abdul, they were never published online, just in print. It used to be a weekly column but doesn’t run any more so the only way would be to contact the Mirror.

By: Abdul

Abdul — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:04:26 +0000

Thats it

thank you very much

do you happen to know where i can find other people idea back then when they were published?

By: Al

Al — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:01:05 +0000

That’s a really nice article and an excellent bit of free advertising, great start.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 22 May 2007 18:11:17 +0000

If you mean the comments from Sir Alan, I have an old scanned copy from the newspaper article here Abdul.

By: Abdul

Abdul — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:53:16 +0000

Where can we get our hands on his comments and the ideas of back then?

By: Pat

Pat — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:40:41 +0000

Spell checkers! Rah!

I have my email client set to run the spell check dialog box (if it finds typos) before sending. It has saved me many a time from embarrassing typos. Even when it pulls me up on a person’s name, it is good to have another chance to make sure you’ve typed “Bertschik” correctly.

Tone is difficult indeed. I often resort to putting “:p” or “:)” at the end of most lines in conversational emails with friends. Otherwise a happy email can turn out sterile.

By: Pat

Pat — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:37:48 +0000

I wouldn’t say that the etiquette of letter writing has been dropped altogether. Rather, email is more widely and frequently used than formal letters ever were.

I use email very often, for various purposes, so I have two styles of emails: ones that are like telephone calls, and ones that are like letters.

Most emails are the short telephone message variety. I start with an idea that I wish to transfer to a friend, and end up sending “dear goose lol :p cya at 8pm flinders. kthx”, or something to that effect.

But rarer is the letter-esque variety, the kind that I would actually proofread before mailing. This kind of email has complete grammar, clear meaning and eloquent expression. It also has the “Dear So-and-so” and “Sincerely/Faithfully/With thanks/etc” lines.

Occasionally, to appear quite very fancy indeed, I will treat the email itself as a “with compliments” slip, and enclose a letter as a PDF, complete with letterhead.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:36:29 +0000

The etiquette of letter writing seems to have been just dropped altogether & email writing is a free for all. Tone isn’t always easy to convey, especially when its business & emoticons are not suitable.

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:26:53 +0000

I’ve received so many poorly written emails! Granted, language can be ambiguous, but spell checkers at least are common enough these days to make it reasonable to expect everything to be properly spelled.

I’m still working on getting the right conversational tone in my emails, rather than just trying to convey information.