Email Etiquette
If you work in an office, you probably write emails every day – to colleagues, to your boss, to clients. Even if you’re still at college, you’ll need to email your lecturers once in a while (maybe to plead for an essay extension, or to ask for help) – and many employers now expect resumes and cover letters to be sent by email.
So, being able to write a professional, business-like email is a crucial skill. Daily Writing Tips has already covered the email subject line, but the body of your message also matters.
1. Start with a salutation
Your email should open by addressing the person you’re writing to. Sure, you can get away with leaving out the salutation when you’re dashing off an email to your friend, but business-like messages should begin with:
- Dear Mr Jones, or Dear Professor Smith, (for someone you don’t know well, especially if they’re a superior)
- Dear Joe, or Dear Mandy, (if you have a working relationship with the person)
It’s fine to use “Hi Joe”, “Hello Joe” or just the name followed by a comma (“Joe,”) if you know the person well – writing “Dear Joe” to one of your team-mates will look odd!
2. Write in short paragraphs
Get straight to the point – don’t waste time waffling. Split your email into two to four short paragraphs, each one dealing with a single idea. Consider using bullet-points for extra clarity, perhaps if you are:
- Listing several questions for the recipient to answer
- Suggesting a number of alternative options
- Explaining the steps that you’ll be carrying out
Put a double line break, rather than an indent (tab), between paragraphs.
3. Stick to one topic
If you need to write to someone about several different issues (for example, if you’re giving your boss an update on Project X, asking him for a review meeting to discuss a payrise, and telling him that you’ve got a doctor’s appointment on Friday), then don’t put them all in the same email. It’s hard for people to keep track of different email threads and conversations if topics are jumbled up.
4. Use capitals appropriately
Emails should follow the same rules of punctuation as other writing. Capitals are often misused. In particular, you should:
- Never write a whole sentence (or worse, a whole email) in capitals
- Always capitalise “I” and the first letter of proper nouns (names)
- Capitalise acronymns (USA, BBC, RSPCA)
- Always start sentences with a capital letter.
This makes your email easier to read: try retyping one of the emails you’ve received in ALL CAPS or all lower case, and see how much harder it is to follow!
5. Sign off the email
For short internal company emails, you can get away with just putting a double space after your last paragraph then typing your name. If you’re writing a more formal email, though, it’s essential to close it appropriately.
- Use Yours sincerely, (when you know the name of your addressee) and Yours faithfully, (when you’ve addressed it to “Dear Sir/Madam”) for very formal emails such as job applications.
- Use Best regards, or Kind regards, in most other situations.
- Even when writing to people you know well, it’s polite to sign off with something such as “All the best,” “Take care,” or “Have a nice day,” before typing your name.
6. Use a sensible email signature
Hopefully this is common sense – but don’t cram your email signature with quotes from your favourite TV show, motivational speaker or witty friend. Do include your name, email address, telephone number and postal address (where appropriate) – obviously, your company may have some guidelines on these.
It makes it easy for your correspondents to find your contact details: they don’t need to root through for the first message you sent them, but can just look in the footer of any of your emails.
Putting it all together
Compare the following two job applications. The content of the emails are identical – but who would you give the job to?
i’ve attached my resume i would be grateful if you could read it and get back to me at your earliest convenience. i have all the experience you are looking for – i’ve worked in a customer-facing environment for three years, i am competent with ms office and i enjoy working as part of a team. thanks for your time
Or
Dear Sir/Madam,
I’ve attached my resume. I would be grateful if you could read it and get back to me at your earliest convenience. I have all the experience you are looking for:
- I’ve worked in a customer-facing environment for three years
- I am competent with MS office
- I enjoy working as part of a team
Thanks for your time.
Yours faithfully,
Joe Bloggs
Have you ever received a really badly written email? Or have you ever been told you need to brush up your own email writing? Share your email etiquette horror stories – and any of your tips – in the comments!
Ali on June 9, 2008 
Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Related Articles
Bookmark
23 Responses to “Email Etiquette”
- 06/09/2008 Writing Jobs and Links : PoeWar.com Writer’s Resource Center
- links for 2008-06-10 | the markfr ditherings
Got something to say?
Sponsors
Popular Articles
- 6 Foreign Expressions You Should Know
- The Impotence of Proofreading
- Let the Word Do the Work
- 10 Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals
- 8 Proofreading Tips and Techniques
- 40 Yiddish Words You Should Know
- TV's War on "Me" and "I"
- 34 Writing Tips That Will Make You a Better Writer
- Gross Writing Errors on the Web
- Creative Writing 101
- Latin Words and Expressions
- Usage That Provokes “Blackboard Moments”
- 44 Resume Writing Tips
Recent Articles
- Say What You Mean
- A Novel IS Fiction
- English Grammar 101: All You Need to Know
- Short Story Competition: Sixth Batch Is Open for Voting!
- Word of the Day: Bourgeois
- The Scandinavian Connection
- Five Reasons Why Blogging Leads to Writing Jobs
- How to Address Your Elders, Your Doctor, Young Children… and Your CEO
- Short Story Competition: Fifth Batch Is Open for Voting!
- Cockney Rhyming Slang
I get real frustrated when other people don’t use good email etiquette and when other people point out to me that I did not use good judgment with email - I get even more upset with myself.
It is very easy to forget that email is a form of two-way communication like speaking and other correspondence. When you speak to someone else, you don’t speak when they are speaking. When you are writing to someone else using snail mail, every word counts and you re-read your stuff to make sure all editing is correct. Email is nearly free and because so it is considered throw-away. This is NOT TRUE!
Email is just another way people look at you and size you up. Ignore this fact at your own risk. Great post!!!
I know it probably makes me an old crank, but I first started using email fifteen years ago when it was considered incredibly rude to top-post, or to not trim the unnecessary bits out of a reply. This came from the fact that people on dial-up, especially in the UK, paid for internet usage by the minute, so anything that wasn’t essential was to be removed to keep costs down.
So despite the fact that pretty much everyone is on a high-speed connection now, top-posting or untrimmed replies still provoke my wrath.
your example email at the bottom uses “yours sincerely” although you addressed it “Dear Sir”!
shame on you! :b
Hi, I just discovered your page and I love it, I am using it in my daily classes, tku
I agree. Email communication has to be in line with letter writing. It is in fact paperless documentation.
Joe Bloggs must not have read your piece as he would have signed off with ‘Yours faithfully’ and not ‘Yours sincerely’
Well, I’ll take the contrary position. Most of the time, email is much closer to a spoken conversation than “real” mail - you don’t start talking to someone by saying “Dear Sir”, and you shouldn’t start an email that way, either; or even with “Jim,” or whatever (unless you’re CC’ing a group a people and you want to be clear about who[m] you’re actually addressing); of course “Dear Sir” is OK in a cold contact situation, etc., but in general I’d alter rule 1 to DON’T start with a salutation, and rule 5 to DON’T sign off the email. (I’d probably alter 6, too, depending on the modern definition of ’sensible’ - if your signature is more than a couple of lines, it’s not sensible. If it includes all that ridiculous legal garbage about how if you received this in error you should destroy it and notify the sender, it’s definitely not sensible and makes you look like a newbie who doesn’t understand the net). And when replying, you should almost always use the following style:
> quote some part of the original message
my reply to that here
> some more quotation
my response to that
and with proper words (not “2″ for to/too, “u” for “you”, etc.)
(As an even older crank than Sheryl, I agree about top-posting - never, ever top-post mail to me, or I will come over to your house and mock you mercilessly. (Though I don’t think the reason it’s bad has anything to do with bandwidth utilization and broadband doesn’t make any difference…I was on a T3 15 years ago). Oh, and don’t post HTML, either!)
My biggest complaint with most email writers is that they don’t sign their emails. Just because their “name” is in the “from” line with an email doesn’t mean that’s the name you want to be or should be called by, and not ever email program shows that information.
It only takes a second to sign your name, even simply, so someone knows what to call you.
-Susabelle (yes, just like this!!)
One thing that drives me buggy is e-mail in texting format (btw, lol, idk, brb). I prefer to see upper and lower case letters, spelled out words, and correct punctuation so I can understand the message on the first read instead of trying to translate what is what.
I receive e-mails seven days a week. They are short and to the point. The topics are usually in their own paragraphs and typed in upper and lower case. Being business correspondence, they frequently have a set signature at the bottom. This makes responding to them easier and clearer.
E-mail is just an electronic version of hard copy correspondence. Quicker, cheaper and still presenting an image of the sender to the receiver.
M. “Charlie” Ferrazzi
Director
The Esther Wells Collection
Laguna Beach, California
I agree with Charlie wholeheartedly. I think the habit of shortening words, text-like, in e-mails should be a hanging offence.
Almost as annoying as the people WHO DON’T KNOW WHERE THE CAPS LOCK IS and have a fetish for exclamation marks!!!!!!!!
Dear Sir/Madam,
In the point 5 you recommend when we adressed to “Dear Sir/Madam” it is better to use “yours faithfully”,But in example email
you use “yours sincerely”.Please write more about it.
your faithfully
M.Amjadi
@Mohsen, @surfmadpig and @Tony:
Whoops, thanks for spotting “Joe’s” mistake — I’ve corrected that now!
Dear Sir,
I just discovered your page and i love it .Please teach me before we sign off the mail with:warm regards ,etc ,we also always using some phrasal sentences such as :please look into this matter ,or ,thank you in advance ,i would be very appeciate on your help in this matter ,etc.Could you please write some more like those in diffrente contents of mails ?
Yours faithfully
juan
its good to be where i belong
What about cc’s? - should the cc be typed again at the top of the body?
What about using From - and To- at the top of the body?
What about typing the subject again in the body?
I completely disagree with Sheryl and Peter about top-posting, as they reference it. I am an executive and people who truncate their message irritate me! In this day & age, people want to find all of the information in one place. I receive more than 500 e-mails per day. I don’t want to go searching for the other bits of information. It makes it appear as though one has something to hide. Sure, there are e-mail accounts that rapidly search for all the messages from a particular sender - but if I open an e-mail once, I want all the information right there. I don’t want to have to open second and third e-mails to find and review all the necessary information. Change is good! Get with the times, people!
As a business correspondent for last 15 years. I really feel pleasure to read articles on e-mail writing, which definitely helpful in my professional career.
Tks n rgds
Writing an effective e-mail depends on one concept: appropriateness.
The level of formality, the organization of the content, the word choices, etc. depend on the purpose you are trying to accomplish and the image you want to communicate.
In the same manner that a person may act and speak differently among his friends than he would in a business meeting, those who write e-mails need to adjust their style to that which is appropriate for the purpose.
I need to know how to write business e-mails. Especially handling customer disputes through e-mail without using any harsh words.Though, i know this website is mainly for freelance writers…i think it would be great if there’s more content on business writing. Not just phrases….but actual samples of business e-mails.
If I am sending, replying or forwarding all of the emails with the CCs,
I always use: -
Warm Regards,
Best Regards, or
Regards.
Is it OK to do that?
Hi Bernstein,
I would say that’s absolutely fine when writing to a group of people, especially if you know some of them but not others.