E-Mail Manners: Have You Understood This?
The other day our teacher at the technical writing class announced, “Today we are going to talk about using E-Mail as an excellent means of communication”. I thought ‘here it comes, at last I will know more about this’. Like many people in India, I was a latecomer to E-Mail, that too only when it was forced upon me. My father was ill after a stroke and I had to often correspond with my sister in the United States. I noticed that her E-Mails always began with ‘Sunder’. Never was it ‘Dear Sunder’. Her replies to my long and meandering E-Mails were often short and sometimes sounded even curt. I was concerned a bit in the beginning. I still am, although I have got used to it a little. Like every communication tool E-Mail came armed with a danger to ruin even our most intimate relationships forever.
At first, when we began our affair with E-Mail, it was wonderful. We were thrilled. E-Mail brought everyone closer, built new friendships and even strengthened existing ones. That was before we took three weeks to answer an E-Mail from a friend who expected a response that morning. That was before many of our school alumni tracked us down to relate all over again. That was before we realized that E-Mail has its own set of rules; we found that E-Mail was a mystery that the user finds out the hard way. The possibility to offend and be offended always looms large over you. There is no Mr. Perfect to explain your E-Mail manners.
Because E-Mail makes it possible to receive an immediate reply, we always expect one. E-Mail expands silence, makes it go faster. A month in E-Mail time feels like twenty years. You could safely wait two months to answer a letter or a few days to return a phone call. But with E-Mail you demand an answer right now. The sad irony is if when you are the one who takes three weeks to answer an E-Mail-there is no problem then. It is only when the person at the other end fails to reply to your E-Mails within hours that you get your pressure up. Again, who wants an E-Mail friend who goes on and on for pages? And who answers your own verbal diarrhoea on paper with just a simple okay?
A polite E-Mail includes and should include several questions if we all had our way. “How are you?, “How was Vinny today?”, “What are you doing this time for Diwali?”. If your friend or relative fails to respond to such questions, you wonder if he or she has actually read your message. But the sad part is that you are least interested in your friend’s Diwali. This is a typical E-Mail mystery; you ask questions whose answers you really don’t want. You then get offended when your own questions are left ignored.
As it was for my sister, ‘Dear’ seems a bit old fashioned on the Net. But when we omit an opening salutation it does sound like picking the phone up and keep talking without saying the beginning ‘Hello’. Again, signing off an E-Mail without the usual ‘sincerely’ or ‘faithfully’ is like putting the phone down without even a goodbye.
‘The confusion of it all makes you want to long for the days when ‘Jane Austen’ wrote her ‘Pride and Prejudice’ with her feather pen and inkpot.
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