Writing That Works, 3e_ How to Communicate Effectively in Business - Kenneth Roman [20]
If you have to change or cancel a meeting on short notice, a phone call or fax works better than e-mail. Don’t count on people checking their In box two hours before the event.
E-mail is not usually the best way to introduce yourself to someone. The executive contacted is probably flooded with messages and is not likely to open or read yours. It’s easier to ignore or hit Delete than to say no thanks in person.
Nothing is private
When you seal a letter, place a stamp on it, and mail it, it does not become the property of the U.S. Postal Service. Your office e-mail, however, is the property of the company that pays for the e-mail system. Companies have the right to search their company mailboxes, and many do. Everybody uses office systems for personal messages. Just remember, it isn’t private.
Some people describe e-mail as a high-tech watercooler, a place for off-color jokes, gossip, gripes about management. But at the watercooler, you have a pretty good idea of who’s within listening range. Monica Lewinsky’s e-comments, used in Clinton’s impeachment trial, led Fortune to comment, “It’s best not to E-mail anything you don’t want to read on the front page of The New York Times.”
Short of that, a good general principle is, never put anything personally negative in e-mail.
Given the litigating world in which we live, it isn’t smart to send potentially distasteful material to colleagues on a corporate network. People have lost their jobs for sending jokes that they believed to be harmless but which offended someone who then complained.
E-mail records of exchanges that may have seemed innocent at the time have been credited as the U.S. Justice Department’s “favorite weapon” in its antitrust case against Microsoft. They are often a plaintiff lawyer’s dream come true. If you’re on a corporate network, backup copies of your e-messages are archived. Lawyers go after system backup tapes to recover and subpoena supposedly deleted documents, and a system administrator can access anything that remains on your computer’s hard drive.
The rule with paper files used to be, “If in doubt, toss it out.” Not so easy with electronic files, where Delete doesn’t delete. All it does is move material to another folder, like Recycle. You can delete again, but all that does is remove pointers to the message. The message itself still exists and can be found, unless you go another step and shred it by scrambling the codes. In any case, a record remains on another computer somewhere. Your odds of keeping something private are better if there is no written file.
The Internet is changing language. It has propelled the previously deliberate pace of language evolution to higher speeds. That was the general agreement at a meeting of the Modern Language Association. “A hotbed for change,” said one linguistics professor.
This is a new medium and an opportunity to be creative — and an invitation to abuse. The Reagan-Bush White House created two hundred thousand electronic files; the Clinton office is creating six million files a year. E-mail is becoming more ubiquitous with wireless transmission and access from mobile phones and handheld computers. Beyond millions of new users coming on-line, e-mail voice recognition has arrived — with the terrifying prospect of people dictating stream-of-consciousness e-mails.
With such developments, the fight to stand out in the clutter can only intensify. It’s unlikely that anyone will award you points for good e-writing. But if you get a reputation for being long-winded, fuzzy, or wasting people’s time, your messages will tend to be glossed over, ignored, or deleted without being read.
VOICE MAIL AND E-MAIL
Business increasingly moves in an interconnected world of e-mail, cell phones, and voice mail. Voice mail can work together effectively with e-mail — to say an important e-mail is coming (“Watch for it”), to summarize its major points, to catch people who don’t keep up with their e-mail every day.
You can’t attach a document to voice mail or provide the same detail