Email isn't dead, it's just gotten irascible in its old age.
William Hanson, a self proclaimed etiquette and protocol expert, lists some characteristics of annoying emails in OMG – are your emails irritating?
His focus is on business correspondence, and here's his sampling of email annoyances:
1. OMG/LOL;
2. Smiley faces;
3. Spelling or grammatical errors;
4. Going AWOL without an auto-reply;
5. XXXs;
6. Terms of endearment like “Honey”, “dear” suggesting the relationship is closer than it is;
7. Corny lines such as “Happy Friday”.
The informality of a friend-to-friend email might excuse some of these. However, #3 really does interfere with the message. Throw in some fractured sentences and several "..."s, and the message can take longer to read than it's worth.
Note this one from the comments: "any e-mail that contains Fw: in the subject line more than twice gets a free ride to the trash folder." Yeah!
I'll add to that one of my own irritants: forwarded emails with a sentence at the top added by a forwarder that says something like this: "I haven't verified any of this, but if it's true, it's really scary!" Then at the bottom it says, "If you really care about the future of this country you'll forward this to ten people." You bet.
Mr. Hanson wrote as if he was (were?) relaying survey results, but there was no link or reference to any real survey. Therefore, I can't verify any of the above. But if you care about the future of this country you'll forward this to ten people.
Comments