A good friend and colleague died this past winter. I quickly learned about a tribute website, and posted a message which expressed my feelings in the passion of the moment. Having achieved some satisfactory personal closure I never got around to contacting his widow, who is also a good friend and colleague.
That faux pas clearly deserves a bitch-slap from Miss Manners and I needed to atone for it. Thus, when the widow wrote a broadcast email with the news that she was moving to a small town where she would be mainly taking care of her aging parents, I responded with some personal news about my family and expressed a wish to keep in touch. I never heard back.
Some possibilities are: a/the lady’s mad at me, as well she should be. But what if b/in her new life she rarely checks email; or, c/my message got caught in her spam filter. How can I know and what do I do about it, if anything? Such are the new challenges of communication in the electronic age, as we attempt to communicate through media that are still being defined.
In my copywriting classes, I always do an informal survey of email habits. Some findings:
1. Email has gotten much more formal over the past decade as it’s become a primary mode of correspondence. Misspellings, for example, are no longer OK. (Save them for IM.)
2. The majority of female senders say they start their message with a salutation (Dear so-and-so) even though it’s superfluous. Most male senders don’t use a salutation.
3. Most people “sign” their emails with their personal name, even though it’s unnecessary because you can be identified both by the “from” line and from the boilerplate signature if you use one. A best practice seems to be to sign off with your first name just above the standard signature, as a way to personalize the email.
4. There’s a trend toward composing email in HTML even though there’s no need for it because no graphics are involved. I like words to stand on their own, so this one really makes me grind my teeth.