Email Style

There’s a review in the New Yorker (“Elements of E-style” by Nick Paumgarten) of a new book that tackles the difficult matter of how properly to write emails.

It seems to me that to write such a book is, in a way, like trying to teach children after you’ve told them they’re on recess. Those dreaded thank-you letters you were made to write, that awkward and formal condolence letter — that is one thing, but email, your release from all that, is surely whee!!

No?

Not according to David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, who have ventured forth into the realm of freeform expression and emoticons with, if not the blackboard pointer of the mythical schoolmarm, then the prescriptivist’s set of do’s and don’ts, most of which sound like they’ll make fun, and possibly chilling, reading. Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home ($15.72 now at Amazon.ca) advises, for example, never forward an email without permission and always expect to have your email forwarded without it. My own way of putting this, revealing perhaps my own catastrophic fantasy, is never send an email that you wouldn’t want published on the front page of the Globe and Mail. I break this rule regularly every day: this is what I mean by chilling. As the author’s say, “”Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature.”

I think that if I worked in a law firm I might set things up so that none of my emails actually went out until I’d had a chance to review them all at the end of the day. Anyone do anything like that, or are your lesser angels closer to seraphim than mine?