If you have ever received an email then you’ll probably agree with me that most emails are full of wasted words. They usually begin with some form of pleasantry. Something asking about your weekend, your evening or your morning.
Most of these casual remarks are empty greetings. Most senders don’t really care about your your weekend, your evening or your morning. These types of greetings have been ingrained into us since childhood and are most likely the result of an eighth grade letter writing lesson. A lesson that was probably taught to us by a kind aging lady with grey hair and glasses.
These pleasantries are redundant in an era where the typical person sends and receives numerous emails in a day. If we all actually responded to these formalities then our email burden would just increase.
The Fix
I’ve been making a real effort these days to not contribute to the excess verbiage. I ignore all the pleasantries and go straight to the point. No greetings. No pleasantries. Nothing to dilute my message.
The problem with this solution is that I now have people asking if I am upset or angry about something. It is interesting how people equate brevity with anger.
Fixing the Fix
I was speaking with a few people about this recently and it seems that the best solution is to add a footnote to the email signature. It’s odd how the solution to being brief without sounding terse is to elongate the email.
Another solution that I have read about online is to add the “Sent from my iPhone” tag to every email. Regardless of where it was sent from. The desired result would be that all email recipients would assume you are being brief since you are using a mobile device.
The solution I am going to go with is sentenc.es. The idea behind sentenc.es is that you respond to email in two, three, four, or five sentences or less. You then add a footnote to your email with a link back to sentenc.es explaining why your email is so brief. So how do you deal with email? Do you buy into the pleasantries or go straight to the point?
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Image Credit: cc licensed flickr photo shared by Mzelle Biscotte
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Hello & Welcome! My name is Matt and I’m a Canadian living in Taipei, Taiwan. Here you’ll find me musing about social networking, web services, and internet business. While you’re here, look at the 
