Chelsie M's Writing Effective E-mails

Writing effective e-mails in the workplace is relatively easy. However, e-mailing in a work place is much different than writing e-mails to your friends. There are several import things to take into consideration when writing e-mails to within your workplace. These important features of an e-mail include subject lines, your recipients, the message content, your signature in the e-mail, and attaching documents to an e-mail.

Subject Lines
You may ask why subject lines are so important. In work place writing, the content of your subject line can be the difference in whether or not your e-mail gets read or deleted. Many people receive tons of junk mail to their e-mail accounts every day. Therefore, be sure to make your subject like eye catching. A good way to get the attention of your colleagues or employee is to use all capital letters.

Recipients
In the work place, many people tent to send e-mails to multiple recipients. This is something you have to be careful of when writing e-mails. When sending e-mails to multiple recipients in your workplace be sure that the e-mail message pertains to all of your recipients. If your message does not pertain to your whole audience then you may want to write several different messages.
Another thing to worry about while e-mailing in your workplace is replying to messages. Sometimes people tend to reply to e-mails that have been sent to them. But instead of just replying to the sender they reply to everyone the message has been sent to. So be careful of this.
One last thing to worry about is forwarding e-mails that have been sent to you. Be sure to get the approval to forward a message from the sender before you forward the message.

Message Content
It is important to remember that people in the workplace are fairly busy. Therefore, they do not have all day to sit and read e-mails. Because of this, it is important to state the purpose of your message in your first sentence. You want your reader to be able to easily skim your message. A way to make this easier for your reader is to your topic sentences in all of your paragraphs.
It is also important to remember that your message is being read on a computer screen and it is much easier if it can be read on a single screen. You should also know that paragraphs within your e-mail should not be longer than a single page if your e-mail happens to be longer than one screen.
Block formatting is typically used in e-mail messages. Block formatting means no indentations of paragraphs and only a single white space between each line. Other formatting issues in e-mailing are things like bold print, italics, underlining, bolded text, tables, graphs, and number lists. These features are not affective in e-mails writing.


Signatures
In e-mail messages where your names appears next to your e-mail in the “From” line it is appropriate to include your name at the end of your e-mail. This is called the signature.

Attachments
Attachments are very common in workplace e-mail messages. Attachments can include proposals, reports, contracts, etc. Attachments are appropriate to be sent when:
1. Your message is long or lengthy
2. Formatting of the document is important
3. The visuals are important
4. If the document with be printed by your reader
I would say that perhaps the most important thing about attachments you should remember is to make reference to it within your message so that your reader knows you are attaching a document.



References
Dobrin, Sidney I; Keller, Christopher J; Weisser, Christian R. Techical Communication in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing.