Tone
Tone in E-mails
Tone is a difficult thing to understand when it comes to e-mails. Something that you think is funny and direct may sound sarcastic and demanding to your reader. E-mails are notorious for not coming across correctly and causing miscommunication. People usually write them very quickly and do not pay them nearly the amount of professional attention they would if they were written letters to be sent by mail. Business e-mails should come across as open, approachable, and respectful, not as insensitive or curt.- Avoid flaming. It is the Internet equivalent of venting your anger or having a verbal war through e-mails. It is best to avoid such situations because they increase tension and conflict. It is very easy to quickly write something and two minutes after hitting the "send" key, regret what you wrote. If you get an e-mail that frustrates or angers you, take a cooling-off period before responding to the e-mail. Doing so will help to keep the worst from coming out, which may be regretted later.
- Before sending your mail out, please recheck your language, tone of voice, spelling, punctuation, etc. If you think something might sound rude or be misunderstood by the recipient, change it so there is no confusion. If it seems unclear to you, then it certainly is going to be the same to the reader.
- Be careful while using sarcasm or humor. In the absence of face-to-face communication, your jokes might be misunderstood. When being humorous in an e-mail, use the right emoticons to imply your mood. In person, people can see your expression, hear your tone of voice, and even watch your body language to get clues as to your meanings and motives. In an e-mail, all those signals are lacking, and that can cause a lot of confusion. It also can lead people to draw their own conclusions about what you mean about something. Especially from a work e-mail account, never send anything that has a sexual, racist, or offensive overtone.
- Avoid using e-mail to convey an extremely personal message. For example, if your message and tone are going to be sad, angry, tragic, shocking, or confidential, it would be advisable to convey such a message in person and not send an e-mail.
Example of a business e-mail:
Because e-mail is so convenient, people often write messages when they are not in the right state of mind. Avoid writing a complaint message when you still are annoyed. Your message must have a calm, professional tone to be effective. The more respectful and positive you are, the more likely you will get the results you desire.
Did you know your e-mail messages at your place of employment are not private?
That is right. There have been multiple court cases and ongoing litigation to determine who owns e-mails created at work and what privacy rights people have with them. Employers at this point have the right to read e-mails produced by employees and many of them do, especially those with dedicated information technology departments. Anytime you send an e-mail at work, assume that it can be read by supervisors. That will keep you always writing clear professional e-mails. Personal e-mail messages should always be sent from home on a personal computer. Even those sent from a work computer using an Internet e-mail provider (such as Yahoo) are subject to being read by your employer.
While you may think you own the e-mails you are creating, you actually are being paid by an employer, using the employer's computer on the employer's time. Thus, many employers argue that they own all work produced on that computer when you are working. There have been some recent victories in favor of employee e-mail being private, but not all of it is at this point.
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