How to Write a Professional Email #2

Lesson 2: Not thinking in an email body

Even if you’re writing a thesis on the spontaneous generation of leptons in a small sample of gallium arsenide without the use of a cyclic particle accelerator, if you put the word “um…” somewhere in the email body I’m going to think you’re an idiot.

It really doesn’t matter whether your email is coming from “@princeton.edu.” If you can’t do me the courtesy of rereading your email before sending it, why should I read it? I know in today’s minute to minute text messaging twittering everybody-has-a-blackberry-or-iphone world people suddenly think that they can’t take more than thirty seconds to compose an email, but c’mon. Is this acceptable?

“I wanted to umm… send you some information and … … maybe this will help… I … uhhh.. attached some file which you might find useful.”

Honestly, I’ve gotten real emails like this. I couldn’t care less how long it took you to think about the sentence you wrote. You telling me that you spent substantial time on something like this doesn’t help your case. By using multiple ellipses it seems more like you’re trying to excuse how terrible it is, rather than make it right.

I know that people of the current generation, myself included, have been taught that “It doesn’t matter how good it is as long as you tried.” All that has done is cause people to try and show all their effort rather than concentrate on results.

What’s the bottom line here? Don’t do it.