Peer to Peer Magazine

80 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | WINTER 2016 Tips on How To Improve Your Writing THE WORD ON WORDS For our third installment, we are examining the necessary evil of email and the wariness with which we must approach this oh-so-informal medium when we use it to conduct our oh-so-important business. In the fall issue, we discussed what to put in the four lines of the header. Now we're looking at the "whens" of email. When To Say "Hi" In the "olden days," as millennials refer to the time before email, we opened a leer with, "Dear Ms. Reichert:"; now we open emails with, "Hi, Amy." We can already feel the loosening, which is nice, not so stuffy, less Victorian. A "Hi" or "Hello," as one commentator put it, helps to "warm the recipient." But if we don't know the recipient, and especially if we're asking the recipient for a favor, we can't go wrong with "Dear Ms. Reichert" followed by a colon and separated from the body, just like an old-fashioned leer. If I initiate an email to someone I know, I open with the person's name followed by a comma and continue on the same line: "Amy, six months ago you asked me to notify you when a new tool would be available." When I respond to an email, I usually open with a sentence, placing the recipient's name at the end, so it feels like a natural statement: "Thank you for leing me know, Amy." When To Remember That Email Is Not Private Although many of us will have our 15 minutes of fame, far more of us will get 15 minutes of infamy. Infamy is easier, and you still get your picture in the paper. If you crave one of the two, and you don't care which — you just want the picture — here's how to achieve infamy now: 1) become rich; 2) buy an NBA team; and 3) write an offensive diatribe in an email. Ask Atlanta Hawks's former owner Bruce Levenson. The brouhaha over Levenson's offensive email a few years back illustrates how comfortable we have become puing our hearts — and sometimes our spleens — into this too-convenient method of communication. We've been using it so long and so reflexively, we sometimes forget the rule: If we wouldn't want our office mates to see it trailing behind a Cessna in a blue sky, we shouldn't put it in an email. Close Encounters of the Email Kind (Act III of IV) by Gary Kinder intro by Randi Mayes Email is the bane of our professional lives. It was highly disruptive when it was the new kid on the technology block; and it remains disruptive, interruptive, downright intrusive and seemingly inescapable. Learning better ways to use the tool goes a long way in alleviating some of the pain. Here's lesson three in Gary's four-part lineup.

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