Lafayette Journal & Courier

Netiquette: Do's and don'ts for e-mails

By KEVIN CULLEN

August 16, 2006

The "do's" and "don'ts" of business correspondence were carved in stone ... then, like a tsunami, the Internet hit.

E-mail's seductive spontaneity and informality can lead employees and managers to spread information that they'd never write or share by voice mail, fax or traditional mail.
"It's weird," says Lorna Myers, of Lafayette. "I get jokes and family photos e-mailed to me at home and work from people I hardly know."

Enter a new term: "netiquette." It's etiquette for e-mail and other Internet exchanges.

Question: What makes e-mail different?

Answer: "The Internet is so convenient, so casual," says Nonnie Cameron Owens, an etiquette consultant and speaker, formerly of West Lafayette and now living in Punta Gorda, Fla. "When you write a business letter, you have to have everything proper and formal. With the Internet, it's like we're talking to one another, and that can be very dangerous."

She's appalled at the way literate people write e-mail, even when the subject is business related. Grammar and spelling rules vanish.

"They put everything in lower case. What is that all about?" Owens says.

E-mailers often don't realize how their expressions of irony, sarcasm and emotion may be received.

"When you are emotional about something, and you're writing a letter, you may have to wait a day before the letter goes out," Owens says. "When you have the computer right there, and you send it immediately, it can backfire on you. You then wish you hadn't sent it."

If angry or upset, wait a day before hitting the "send" key, she says.

Q: How "confidential" are e-mail messages?

A: They aren't. Anything sent as an e-mail or posted on a blog, Facebook or MySpace can come back to bite the writer, Owens warns.

"If you don't want your hometown, or your mother, to see it, don't send it," she says.

In a recent interview, Pablo Malavenda, associate dean of students at Purdue University, spoke of the "implications" of Facebook, an online Internet directory that connects college and high school students through school affiliation.

No one can access a user's complete profile unless he is invited to be that person's "friend," and the friendship is confirmed.

The danger comes from how much personal information the person posts -- including phone numbers and indecent photos -- and how discriminating they are in accepting others as "friends."

Malavenda said that more than 25 percent of the employers who hire Purdue students say they use Facebook as a tool when interviewing candidates for internships and jobs.

"It's like making a poster of your life and putting it on a bulletin board and then being surprised to know that people are reading it," he says.

Q: What is confidential and what isn't?

A: A 2004 Australian government survey showed that 23 percent of 3,000 respondents felt it was acceptable for an employer to read e-mails sent to employees' work accounts, while 34 percent found it was unacceptable.

Most of those who approved of the practice said it was only acceptable if wrongdoing was suspected.

Forwarding, excerpting, or copying an e-mail without permission is a breach of netiquette, too.

"Treat the electronic correspondence you receive with the same respect that you would treat a letter from your postal carrier marked 'confidential,' " says Cincinnati's Ann Marie Sabath, author of Business Etiquette in Brief and founder of At Ease, Inc., a corporate etiquette business with offices nationwide.

Q: What are some things that I should keep in mind when sending an e-mail?

A: Provide only "need-to-know information," Purdue University English professor Richard Johnson-Sheehan replied -- fittingly -- via e-mail to questions posed by the Journal & Courier.

"Decide who needs to know what you have to say, and send them only information they need -- nothing more," said Johnson-Sheehan, who included a chapter on e-mail and e-mail "netiquette" in his book, Technical Communication Today.

"If the message is confidential or proprietary, e-mail is not an appropriate way to send it," he says.

American humor can disturb international audiences, Johnson-Sheehan says, so if a message is going overseas, "keep the humor to a minimum."

Regard for others is the key to etiquette and netiquette.

"Don't be unpleasant over e-mail if you would not be unpleasant face to face," Johnson-Sheehan says. "E-mail provides a false sense of security, much like driving in a car. Remember that those are real people on that information superhighway, and they have feelings."

Etiquette tips
Keep e-mails short, no more than two screens, says Ann Marie Sabath, author of Business Etiquette in Brief.

The "tone" should reflect the degree of familiarity that exists between the sender and the receiver; using capital letters indicates shouting, she says.

And, like regular mail and voice mail, Sabath says, e-mail should be checked regularly and replied to promptly.

Here are 10 of the most common e-mail mistakes, according to Sabath:

1. Not checking e-mail with the same regularity as checking voice mail.

2. Not labeling the subject of the message to reflect the message content.

3. Not responding to e-mails promptly.

4. Not proofing electronic messages with the same attention given documents in hard copy form.

5. Being verbose instead of succinct.

6. Sending out unsolicited mass mailings that could be considered junk by recipients.

7. Bodying messages "urgent" when they are not.

8. Not listing a phone number and fax number in the message so the recipient has that information at hand.

9. Trying to be humorous in messages when it could be misinterpreted as sarcasm.

10. Sending copies of e-mail to people in address groups rather than being selective about who receives messages.