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Hitting
the Hi spots
It is asynchronous: you write and reply at a time independent to that of your correspondent. You will have many email conversations, known as threads, at the same time. A few conventions will smooth communication between you and your correspondents, and ensure that your email is not a source of irritation but a welcome commodity. The essence of netiquette is do as you would be done by. You can't assume everyone has access to the same software as you. Stick to 'open standard' formats, such as ASCII text, PDF (portable document format) or (RTF) rich text format. Big files tie up bandwidth (see below): don't send them unsolicited. Keep your email messages short - a few hundred words at most. Think haiku not Proust. A long email can be tricky to reply to in the midst of many brief messages, and the conversational aspect allows readers to request any further information. How should you begin? If you're replying to an email it's easy: just copy the way your correspondent addressed you. Initiating an email conversation is a little more tricky. A common convention is Hi, because email grew up in the computer science cloisters of North America, and Americans use Hi as a polite yet informal address. We Brits may cringe from it: Hello, Hi Tim, Tim: Dear Tim, and Dear Mr Albert are acceptable variations of increasing formality. To the email purist, however, all are redundant. The person addressed already appears in the To field of the email, so using their name again is unnecessary. A good compromise is to include a salutation at the start of a thread - but to cut straight to your message once the thread is established. The same reasoning might lead you to think that there's no need to sign an email: the From field will have already been filled out. But including a signature is useful if you wish to swap to another mode of communication. By convention it should be no more than 4 lines long. Email encourages a direct and personal style, because it is essentially a focussed written composition for one person. It should be informal, easy-to-use and speak personally. It should use direct and colloquial language - and active verbs, all of which aid readability. It should use the 'news pyramid', with the message at the start, because that is the part of the message that is seen first when it is clicked open on screen. Email is a perfect training ground for writers and the standard of writing will rise as more and more people use it. Paradoxically, writing for a single recipient generates prose that is more readable for a wider audience. Further reading: http://www.albion.com/netiquette/book/index.html http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt
Understanding bandwidth. (A little bit technical, but worth it) Network connections are rated in bits/second. For example, the fastest kind of analog modem receives information at 56,000 bits/second (commonly known as 56k). There are 8 bits in a byte, or character, so a typical email of a few hundred words weighs in at around 2 kilobytes, and would be transmitted over a typical modem connection (33600 kilobits/second = 4 kilobytes/second) in about half a second. An attached Word document with exactly the same information, plus a little formatting might be 50 kbyte (13 seconds), and an uncompressed colour image might be 500kb (130 seconds). Sending people large files without prior permission is antisocial, because it ties up their bandwidth. It's better to upload them to a web site, post a link (probably about 50 bytes), and let anyone who is interested fetch the big file for themselves. 03.09.01 |
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