How to Write a Professional Email #8

Lesson #8: Do not schedule useless meetings

I guess this lesson isn't technically about email, but at work "outlook" is synonymous with "email" just like "research" is synonymous with "surfing the net until you get bored then using the first Google result." Since meeting requests pop up as email alerts and are sent in roughly the same way as an email, it's important to use the same care and consideration with them.

Since almost all meetings are totally useless, trite, and moot, you might think that you should never call them. Not so! Unlike emails which only result in more emails, meetings can have real world consequences.

Consider the following:
Your boss calls a meeting at noon on a Friday. Everybody has had a tough week and most people were planning on grabbing a three martini lunch over at Applebee's. To keep morale high, your boss decides to order pizza for everybody. Instead of scavenging the leftover pizza in the company kitchen when it's all cold and picked over you get free hot pizza! And there's some pepperoni left too!

Now that you know the true secret of why people call meetings, apply the same rules before calling your own by asking yourself the following questions:

• Can I get free food from my boss?
• Can I steal soda out of the conference room?
• Am I trying to avoid another meeting?
• Do I like free pizza and will this get me some?

If the answer is yes, call the meeting. If not, tell your boss everybody is really depressed and he should have a meeting about it at noon on Friday.

How to Write a Professional Email #7

Lesson #7 - ALL CAPS DOES NOT MEAN YOU'RE YELLING, IT MEANS YOU'RE ANNOYING

I thought this was about as obvious as the ending to a Disney movie, but here goes: do not ever write your email in ALL CAPS. Maybe you're excited that your daughter had a baby, maybe your house is on fire, or maybe you're really mad that somebody parked in the parking space you always use even though your company doesn't have reserved spaces. Whatever the reason, there is a handy key on your keyboard to deal with it -- and no, I don't mean Caps Lock. It's the exclamation point, and it is usually less annoying.

Exclamation points are relatively simple to use, and with practice you'll even be able to type them with one hand. Trust me, it's simpler than using chopsticks, discounting when you get frustrated and barbarically impale those crunchy water chestnuts. To type one, proceed as follows:

1. Place your left pinky on the shift key and leave it there.
2. If you have short little sausage fingers, proceed to step 5.
3. Rotate your wrist and press the "1" key with your left middle finger.
4. Proceed to step 6.
5. Press the "1" key with your right index finger.
6. Release the shift key.
7. Repeat from step 1 to add emphasis.

If you're wondering if you've overused it, take a listen as you type. Does it sound like your fingers are harmoniously playing a very small plastic drum set, or does it sound like a woodpecker? If the answer is a woodpecker you're typing too many "!" characters, and odds are there are sporadic "1" characters in there too.

Bonus Lesson: Ways to Add Emotion or Sound Without Pissing People Off

If you're not using a blackberry or iPhone, there are other handy substitutes which include the bold font, italics case, and underline. Each has a specific use, and can aid greatly in injecting emotion into your writing. See? I just did it. Twice.

• Bold - Makes a word louder or more pronounced.
• Italics - Adds snarkiness or sarcasm. Can also add feeling.
• Underline - Makes people pay attention to the word, as in "You may not pee in our pool." Sometimes people just don't get it.

Use restraint though and restrict these modifiers to one or two words. Otherwise you just look like you accidentally clicked on the button.

How to Write a Professional Email #6

With the availability of cheap digital cameras it's now easier than ever to fill up your computer with highly detailed photos of cats. Cheap hard disk drives and the ubiquitous nature of broadband internet connectivity have further distanced us from the idea that we can't amass enormous feline photo archives. So what do we do with all these pictures depicting a cat trying to open a doorknob, chasing a laser pointer, or clawing up somebody's leg? We email them of course! But herein lies the problem.

You'll really need to scale and crop your image appropriately or one of the following situations can occur:

• The message is rejected by the mail server because the attachment is too large.
• The person opens the image and sees a gigantic eyeball because your eleventy-billion-gigapixel camera takes images so detailed that your nose hairs can be counted even when you're not taking pictures of the inside of your nose.
• The camera managed to get a reflected image of you taking the picture, which you can only see when it's big (and you're naked)
• The recipient of the file is on a dial-up or cellphone connection and has to pay for minutes. Even though the cat in a paper bag is hilarious, they still get angry with you.
• IT decides to check what all your mail traffic is about and discovers that you've been having an affair with your boss.
• You fill up the Microsoft Exchange server with useless crap and cause the email system at work to go down.

In order to prevent any of the above from happening, scale your images first in a program like Paint .NET, Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro before attaching them to the email. Most camera software even supports basic crop and resize features; you probably already have a program on your computer to do this.

The rule here is: keep attachments under 2 mb, or just start a flickr website like everybody else. If you need to email somebody a large picture resize it down and save it as a jpeg or png file. If they want to count your nose hairs, they'll ask for the high resolution file but it's safe to assume that they won't.