In e-mail, your typeface is a less than ideal proxy for your best flannel suit. To some degree, you can convey personality and professionalism with your font and signature, but your efforts often get stymied by the recipient’s e-mail provider.

And e-mail not only strips your formatting flourishes, it strips your speech of its natural tone, cadence and pitch.

Worse still, it’s easy to come off like a jerk through e-mail, even if you’re really a nice person offline. Seemingly minor things can aggravate your readers, like excessive use of the Cc field or poor use of please and thank you.

According to David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, authors of “SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home,” the word please “almost always comes across as obnoxious and is best to omit.” “‘Thank you,’” they say, “is appropriate to use after a favor, and snotty when used before.” Thanks for your prompt attention to this matter.

Your best chance of making a good impression through your writing is to emulate the way you talk.

It’s no surprise that conversational writing is now becoming de rigueur on the web. Not only is it easier and more enjoyable to read, colloquial copy has the added benefit of reassuring a potential client that you are, in fact, a human being. No one wants to talk with jargon-spewing robot, let alone buy an insurance policy from one.

Many people falsely believe that writing must be nearly impenetrable to be considered “professional.” This falsehood is rampant in corporate America.

Apparently not everyone got the memo from George Orwell, who, way back in 1946, called attention to the ridiculousness of robo-writing when he re-wrote this famous passage from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here is the same passage, this time in corporatespeak:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Links:
Thinkbeforeyousend.com