I have sent and received a lot of emails in my life for work, school, and extracurricular activities (especially for blogUT-related things). Over this time, I have developed many email pet peeves that are not only annoying but waste everybody’s time. These do not only include chain mail type emails with subject lines such as “Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: reply to this or you will die tonight” but other smaller things that a lot people don’t seem to be aware of. I always reply politely of course, but I am grinding my teeth while doing so.

If you are part of a student group, your primary means of communication is probably email. It is less time-consuming than having to constantly meet up, and you don’t have to worry about co-ordinating with each person’s schedule. You also probably use email to communicate with other classmates, say if you are working on an assignment together. Most importantly, you probably email TAs and professors to ask questions about courses or to request letters of recommendation for grad school (you know, if that’s important to you or something). Regardless of who you are trying to contact, you obviously never want to piss people off or waste their time, yet there is a chance that you inadvertently do so. Here is a list of things to watch out for:

Reply to the ENTIRE email. Some people tend to only respond to the last bit of a message, forgetting to address anything in the first bit. This is a huge waste of time for everyone, and incredibly irritating, because the recipient has to then send another email asking them the same questions yet again.

Check your spelling, grammar, and punctuation, dammit. This one is pretty obvious, but there are still people who seem to type up emails as if they were casually IM-ing with a friend. Doing this basically tells the other person that they aren’t important enough to you that you can’t take two minutes (or less) to read over your message before hitting Send. It is actually insulting, especially if the recipient is a professor or someone that you should be a little more respectful towards. On that same note…

For the love of God, check that you spelled the recipient’s name correctly, whether it be an organization or a person. We get messages all the time to “U of T Blog” and my (mental) response is “Do you not know who you’re writing to?”

Use BCC and CC correctly. Don’t hit Reply All if the people CC’ed and BCC’ed don’t need to read what you said. Conversely, make sure that everyone who does need to read your message (but doesn’t need to reply) gets CC’ed or BCC’ed.

Don’t send a new message as a reply to an old one just because you’re too lazy to look for the person’s email address and copy and paste it into a new email. You’re starting a new topic that doesn’t have anything to do with the one in the old email, which doesn’t make sense.

Use a proper email address. You are not sixteen years old anymore (unless you are a child prodigy attending university, but even if you are this applies). [email protected] is NOT a professional-looking email address. Use your @utoronto.ca address if anything.

If you liked this post, check out this rather hilarious webcomic entitled If you do this in an email, I hate you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under Clubs, Survival Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.