Ten top tips for effective emails

While the Internet can trace its 'commercial birthday' to 15th March 1985 - the date of the first 'dot-com' registration - the first email, then known as an "electronic message", was sent as long ago as 1971. Yet it has only been in the last 15 years or so that email has developed into something that is now a preferred means of communication for - seemingly - a majority of the world's population.

In the early 1990s, I attended a meeting of the Association for Computer Based Training (which eventually became the eLearning Network) at which one of the speakers gave out her email address. Some people's response was along the lines of: "Why have an email address when so few other people have one? You have no one with whom to communicate!"

How wrong they were about to be.

Some key dates in the history of email include:

1971 A computer engineer called Ray Tomlinson sends the first electronic mail message

1982 The word "email" is first used - and the 'smiley' emoticon is invented by Scott Fahlman

1997 Microsoft Outlook is released

1998 The word "spam" (in its technological sense) is added to the Oxford English Dictionary

2003 George W Bush signs into law the CAN-SPAM Act, the USA's first national standards for sending commercial emails

Some commentators, including the business leadership guru Stephen Covey, have argued that through the Internet - including email - human beings have witnessed an explosion of communication, commerce, idea-sharing and connectivity unlike anything else in their history.

Unlike other revolutions in communication - such as the invention of the printing press or even the Renaissance in Europe - the Internet-fuelled explosion in communication is, all at once, egalitarian, worldwide and 'synchronous' (or simultaneous in 'real time'). Never have news, views and ideas had such a vehicle to transport them, instantly, anywhere and everywhere to anyone and (almost) everyone.

While this makes communication easier and faster - particularly with people who are geographically separated from each other - it also multiplies opportunities for misunderstanding messages (particularly across cultures) and taking offence at the implied 'tone'. Moreover, anyone who has inadvertently sent an email to the wrong person or revealed other recipients' email addresses by not choosing the bcc option knows how challenging observing 'email etiquette' can be.

There are also potential dangers before you even start to compose an email. Intellectual property and IT law specialist Sarah Staines, of Touchstone Legal Services, suggests that, when collecting email addresses, you should refer to the eight principles of data protection to decide whether your actions are both legal and sensible. Moreover, you should only use the data for the purposes for which it was collected.

Yet, despite the potential pitfalls with every aspect of emailing - from collecting and maintaining email addresses, to writing and sending emails - the modern business world now insists on this communication method.

The increasing use of email over the last 15 years or so has seen the development of 'email etiquette' - that is, accepted and acceptable ways of 'doing email'. Recently, Quasar, an IT and customer services training company, distilled its many years' experience of helping people improve their email skills into ten top tips for effective emails:

• Keep it short and to the point

• Answer any questions, add any other information that may be useful

• Use proper spelling, grammar and punctuation

• Lay out the email as if it was a letter

• Make it personal

• Answer quickly

• Avoid long sentences

• Take care if you use abbreviations - will the person receiving the email understand them?

• Put a subject heading in that makes sense

• Read it before you click send.

Jaqui Hodgetts, Quasar's head of training, explained: "Email has a number of advantages over other written forms of business communication, not least because it can reach its destination almost anywhere in the world within seconds, making it one of the quickest forms of written communication.

"Yet emails can be obscure, ambiguous, cluttered with attachments and downright unwelcome. Attachments can be a real problem - especially if the file size is so large it can't be sent or is stopped by the recipients' spam filters. And, if you can open your attachment and need to work on it, how many times have you lost your changes?

"Again, there are many email styles and formats. An individual may prefer a particular style and format but organisations might like all their employees to be consistent in their email style, in the same way they want consistency about all their messaging. Allowing individualisation in emails could be, at best, confusing and, at worst, detrimental from an organisational-image perspective.

"Then, there's the issue of email and the law; or how you file emails so that you can retrieve them on demand, and so on."

Bob Little writes about, and commentates on, corporate learning and technology-related subjects. He can be contacted at bob.little@boblittlepr.com