E-mail and credibility

For hundreds of years, business letters were the primary channel for businesses communications. Company secretaries, usually men, were valued for their effusive prose and elegant cursive handwriting. The business letters that they crafted could take a day to produce and another month to deliver.

Over time, business letter writing styles have become less fancy, production has become computerized, and postal delivery has accelerated. However, the business letters of today remain among the most formal and official written business communications channels.

Meanwhile, e-mail has been around for less than twenty years. In this short time, e-mail has transformed the way businesses communicate in writing. While business letters remain formal and official, e-mail is informal, and sometimes casual. While business letters still follow strict formats, e-mail has few conventions to follow. Where good business letters take an hour to produce, e-mail is dashed off unedited in five minutes. E-mail messages are paperless, brief and almost instantaneous.

E-mail is a conversational business channel. This means that the tone and formality you write in your e-mail should match that of a spoken, face-to-face conversation you would have with your recipient.

Some business writers are still adjusting to this and write their e-mail messages according to formats learned in school. Other business e-mail writers (mostly recent grads) are adjusting from using e-mail as a social toy to e-mail as a business tool.

Loose, unchecked styles such as these allow modern business writers to become careless. Grammar, usage, tone, capitalization and punctuation become unimportant. Styles may be either too formal or too casual for business; and we express ourselves with downloaded cartoon emoticons.

This is okay if you are writing to a friend or an internal colleague, but remember, any e-mail you send out from your office to another represents the way your company does business. As a result, it’s essential to take a few extra minutes with your external e-mail. Reread it for clarity. Proofread it for language errors. Ensure that it looks presentable on your screen so it will look presentable on your reader’s.

Your company’s credibility shows up in the way you write. That’s why looking professional is important. A few extra minutes with each external e-mail you send is time well spent.