Effective Email Etiquette: Tips for Professional Business Communication

“That could have been an email.” 

At some point, we’ve all said that after yet another gratuitous meeting. Often it seems that there is a blurry ground between what requires the personal touch, and what could have just been a group email. Although, email is just another form of communication, which in and of itself has its form of etiquette.

Sometimes it can feel like you need a Graduate Certificate in Communications to work out how to talk to people online, but it doesn’t need to be so daunting! If you find yourself working with people exasperated by meetings but unresponsive to emails, follow this handy guide for all your internet communication needs!

Visual Tone

Studies show that most of our communication is done non-verbally. This means that the words we use are often not as important as the tone, facial cues, and somatic gestures we use when communicating. For example, it’s wonderful to hear “I love you,” but you probably wouldn’t be as receptive to that statement if the person saying it immediately punched you in the face.

So in a toneless medium like email and text, how do we communicate tonality and gesture?

The same way that sign language has an accent based on appearance, so too does digital communication, and the appearance of your words and the manner in which grammar is used can influence how they are read or understood, for example:

Can you take the bins out please? 

Against:

Can. You. Take. The. Bins. Out. PLEASE!?

Notice how one is a calm, cool request, and the other a desperately angry and exasperated cry for help? The bold text highlights importance. The period after each word lets the reader “hear” the intentional nature of every word. The all capitals “please” signifies an increase in volume, while the italics provide emphases. Finally the interrobang (!?) at the end grants a frustrated context to the sentence.

Choosing Words

Language is beautiful because every language all around the world is constantly changing. Language is not set in stone, no country’s lexicon is a one-and-done type deal. Hundreds of years ago English sounded nothing like it does now, and there was a time when modern English didn’t even exist! Much of English as we know and understand it now is the result of war and culture-mingling between Britain, France, and Norway.

It’s important to remember this because communicating effectively via email or any digital means has two main modes of deliverance, the second we will get into later. However, as you might have guessed, the primary means of digital communication is through words.

Our words don’t just have literal dictionary meanings, but they have contextual appropriateness. Certain words have a different emotional weight compared to their synonyms. For example, “House” and “Home.” Both describe a place of residence, but “home” carries an infinitely warmer, more comforting connotation, whereas a “house” is merely a type of building. Or again think of “penetrate” as opposed to “stab.” There’s a clinical air to the former, while “stab” carries a violent passion with it.

Remember the importance of literal meaning vs connotation. Saying “You are failing your jobs” is much harsher and more derogatory than “Lately we’ve been noticing a discrepancy between projected output and production capabilities.” One blames the staff and paints them as worthless, the other leaves wriggle room for understanding and cohesive development.

The Dreaded Emoji

Emojis, those little pictures of yellow faces and more that come up in texts, are surprisingly contested in the world of business emailing. They’re also the second major component of modern communication we hinted at earlier. They serve to add clarification and emotional context to a medium like digital communication, and yet they have something of a reputation as being for those who struggle with “traditional” communication.

However, as we stated earlier, language only exists because language constantly evolves. It isn’t solid or eternal and neither are the rules that we bind ourselves to when using it. Language develops around sociocultural trends, tastes, the interactions and inter-breeding across cultures, and the unique inflections gained when expatriates learn other languages. So if we’re going to start criticizing the use of emojis because they aren’t “traditional”, then maybe we should throw out our laptops and go back to the wax tablets of ancient Greece, or the clay bricks and cuneiform script of ancient Sumeria.

Let’s examine the following:

Could you tell me how you worked that out?

As opposed to:

Could you tell me how you worked that out? 😀

In the greater context of the full email, the first example could be read well, but it could also be read with a passive-aggressive tone. The emoji at the end of the second example instantly gives it more brightness, and dispels any negative connotations to the sentence. Finally, while Emoji’s non-universal nature may present some barrier, most digital communication mediums have one analogue or another for the same emoji, and email accounts on the same intranet will all have access to the same emoji sets.

Capping off with the fact that English’s modern Latin alphabet evolved from Proto-Sinaitic pictographic writing systems, what’s the harm in using pictures now to avoid a conflict of intent and understanding?

Basic Manners

To finish, we’d just like to add a final element of demystification to the whole emailing thing. At the end of the day, emailing is just digital letter writing; and people have been writing letters for centuries. If you want to write good emails just, imagine that the screen is paper and the keyboard a pen. Write a letter. Start with “Dear” and then put the name of whoever you’re writing to, be specific, and be polite..

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