Email Correspondence: Slow Down and Keep it Professional

By: Kandice Thorn

In these days of harried email correspondence, it is easy to send off emails without much thought.  But remember that every email you send has a recipient.  It may in fact have multiple recipients.  It may get forwarded to other recipients.  And everyone who reads your email messages will make judgments about you based on those messages.  They will judge your level of professionalism, your professional judgment, your maturity, and your mastery of the English language (even if English is your first language--perhaps especially if English is your first language!), among other things.


I am not suggesting that you treat an email to your mother or your best friend with the same level of care that you would a potential employer, but I am suggesting that you consider the image you are conveying when you send emails to professors, administrators, networking contacts, colleagues and others, including even your classmates and friends.

Below are a few rules to keep in mind when sending email correspondence.

1.  Use complete sentences, capitalized correctly.  Do not type using all lowercase letters.  Do not type using all uppercase letters.  Do not type one long run-on sentence and expect your reader to infer the appropriate punctuation.  The proliferation of smart phones and texting, in particular, have contributed to a culture of laziness in this respect.  If you have a smart phone in hand and cannot do the above, hold off on sending the email until you can get to a real computer.

2.  If you are addressing the recipient as Mr. or Ms., check their gender to be sure you are using the correct prefix.  It is not very difficult to find out a person's gender by doing a quick Google search.  For example, most native English speakers would know that Toni Fine, our Assistant Dean, is a woman, but many foreigners do not.  Thus, she frequently receives emails from strangers addressed "Dear Mr. Fine."  These senders could easily discover that Dean Fine is a woman with a quick Google search.  If I type "is Toni a male or female name" into Google, the first hit, a Wikipedia entry, says "Toni is a given name.  In English it is often female, the male version being Tony."  If you want to be even more certain, you can do a Google image search for Toni Fine.  Thirteen images come up with photos of Dean Fine, at which point it should be quite obvious that "Ms." is the correct form of address.  (Note: In fact, the proper address here would be "Dean Fine," but "Ms. Fine" is also appropriate and is far preferable to "Mr. Fine.")

3.  Proofread your email before you send it. The number of times that you proofread it depends on the level of importance of the email and the recipient, but you should always proofread at least once.

4.  Do not use shorthand.  This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and of many other people I know.  "You" should never be shorted to "u" and -- if you get nothing else from this post please hear this -- "want to" should never, ever be shorted to "wanna."   

5.  Check your recipient(s).  Before you hit "Send," look at your recipient list to make sure the correct address(es) are in the address line.  Also, check to make sure you did not hit "Reply All" by accident!

Above all, remember that email correspondence is important.  Slow down and write with care and chances are you will make a good impression.