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The Standard Group Plc is a multi-media organization with investments in media platforms spanning newspaper print operations, television, radio broadcasting, digital and online services. The Standard Group is recognized as a leading multi-media house in Kenya with a key influence in matters of national and international interest.
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  • The Standard Group Center,Mombasa Road.
  • P.O Box 30080-00100,Nairobi, Kenya.
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Practise e-mail etiquette for a successful career

Career Tips

 

e-mail etiquette
 e-mail etiquette

When I was back in formal employment, I had the advantage of dealing with both technical and non-technical people.

We had an inside joke at work that you could tell exactly who the email you were reading came from from the very first sentence.

Everyone has these experiences, there are those people whose grammar and punctuation go out of the window on e-mail, those who use too many exclamation points and question marks and those who ‘shout’ on email, which is the equivalent of using capital or red letters when typing e-mails.

The argument is sometimes that so many e-mails are sent at work that using red or caps is the only way to gather attention.

Even worse are those times someone writes an email when they’re angry, hit the send button and then instantly regret it.

This has happened to everyone at some point, though some people have got away with either recalling the e-mail or deleting it just before they hit ‘send’. There are ways of ensuring that you observe email etiquette, one too many blunders can impact on your credibility.

E-mail is for eternity

Remember that e-mail lasts forever, and can be accessed by anyone in the organisation, from the system admin to your boss. Do not put anything on e-mail unless you would be comfortable with it being projected for the whole organisation to read.

If there is anything that the now infamous Sony hacks have taught us, nothing on the interwebs is private. Leave sensitive remarks and conversations for face to face encounters.

Grammar and language

Keep your e-mails as professional as possible by avoiding emoticons or shortened words that you would use on text such as ‘b4’. Ensure that your subject lines have the correct capitalisation – subject lines written fully in small letters or excessive exclamation points or question marks will likely be marked as spam and sent to the junk folder.

Flow

To avoid confusing your recipients, ensure the subject of the e-mail matches the contents. Try to use the five to seven words subject line to capture as much of the essence of the email as possible. Keep the content of the e-mail short and to the point.

Use bullet points and numbers to get straight to the point of what your ‘ask’ is. Do not make the recipient have to dig through paragraphs for the expected action. If it is an information e-mail then indicate ‘FYI’.

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