How to Write a Professional Email #1

The last person you would ever want giving you advice on writing is an engineer. Luckily for you, I've switched to Marketing. There are a few common practices that can really help make you seem like less of an idiot when you email your coworkers. If you learned to write by sending text messages, blogging, or using Twitter than you're probably guilty of more than a few of these:

• Not capitalizing "i" when using it to refer to yourself.
• Thinking inside the email body by including ellipses or "Um."
• Misspelling an email address and getting mad when you don't get a reply.
• Copying the wrong person in a reply.
• Using CC (Carbon Copy) instead of BCC (Blind Carbon Copy).
• Sending useless reminders or scheduling meetings nobody will attend.
• Forgetting an attachment or attaching the wrong type of file.
• Including an image which looks horrible.
• Using a font nobody else has.
• Having a bad email signature.
• Not being concise enough.
• Writing about writing.

There are endless blogs and guides on writing and common grammatical errors. It would be redundant to repeat those here, we all have Google. What we don't all have is common sense; this series will focus on those mistakes which are most common but which are not grammatical in nature.

You don't need to write as if you got your English Degree from Harvard for people to think you are intelligent, but you sure don't want to write as if you got your GED from Riker's Island. Generally in business people won't notice small grammatical errors like changing tense, comma faults, or disagreeing pronouns. My formal writing training ended when I graduated college, but it doesn't take a genius to write a letter; emails should be no different.

Lesson 1: Not capitalizing "i" and spelling phonetically



Nothing makes me angrier than when I see a sentence like "what r u doin?" or "i h8 u." This kind of short hand might come in handy when you're giving instructions to your CounterStrike team, in the middle of an intense World of Warcraft raid, or trying to type while eating a sandwich but it has no place in a professional email. Is it that hard to hit the shift key? If you don't take the time to thoughtfully compose emails I can only assume that you don't have anything useful to say. It's not like you're paying for bandwidth anymore, don't be stingy with letters.

I can understand the need to use this type of language in text messages. At ten cents a pop, they are exceedingly expensive. Making the most of that character limit can save you some serious coin, at the expense of your dignity. Emails do not suffer the same restrictions.

The rule here is, when writing a professional email never use shorthand. Unless you're on the mailing list for the society of court stenographers, the recipient will thank you for your completeness. Also, always capitalize the letter "i" when referring to yourself.

If you send me your resume attached to an email that looks like it came from a 13 year old, it's going in the garbage. Your Ph. D. from the University of Phoenix Online won't mean squat and neither will your managerial experience from McDonalds. If you can't take the time to write it, I can't take the time to read it.