Great email is an important career skill

Ok, so the reports and documents I write in Word and submit to my management are forever, I get that. But not email. That’s different, right?

Nope, that too, and this does mean you.

Casual email habits start early

Many of us spend a lot of time writing and reading e-mail, and most of us have our first experiences in e-mail communicating with our friends. In this respect e-mail sometimes resembles instant messages, and you may treat them interchangeably with regard to form. Sentence fragments, abbreviations (LOL, IMHO, AFAIK, and others), inside jokes, obscure references (“its only a flesh wound”), and strange vocabulary are part of what has become a powerful mechanism for building and sharing in virtual communities with people we rarely see. Good stuff.

Moving on to professional email habits

But once you begin to have professional communications (whether related to your academic career or to life after school), these practices are out of place. In fact they can actually damage your ability to communicate effectively with others to whom you are not so intimately connected by circumstance, age, and culture.

Change now!

If you are reading this kind of stuff on the web, the odds are pretty good that you’ve already started your professional life, even if you are still in school or working to complete your training. Now is the time to start breaking these habits of familiarity and informality.

What to look for

I’m not suggesting that you sterilize your e-mail of all things personal and write with the formality you would employ on a final project paper in senior design.

What I am suggesting is that you write in complete sentences, with proper usage (spelling, punctuation, and grammar). Spend a little time organizing your thoughts. If you aren’t sure, look up the difference between affect and effect before you hit the send key (I still get those backwards).

In many parts of the world we start e-mailing and texting in elementary school these days. It will probably take you a while to break your bad habits, so start now.

Separate styles in different accounts

If you really feel that this will cramp your style in a particular social community to which you belong, let me encourage you to separate this community from all your other e-mail transactions.

Get at least two e-mail accounts. Use one for your informal communications and one for everything else. This will get you in the mindset of having different writing styles for different contexts, and this will serve you well when you need to separate your work e-mail from your personal messaging.