'Elements of E-Style'

Above, the title of Nick Paumgarten's entertaining April 16, 2007 New Yorker piece about a new book by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe entitled "Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home."

Shipley is the Op-Ed page editor of the New York Times and Schwalbe is editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books.

Here's the New Yorker article.

Elements of E-Style

E-mail isn’t the most self-conscious medium; haste and volume encourage many correspondents to forget themselves. Still, everyone settles on a style. The lower-case non-punctuators, the serial capitalizers, the rhetorical questioners, the subpoena-anticipators, the posterity-watchers: they all have their reasons, and their conceits.

Two years ago, David Shipley, the Op-Ed editor of the Times, and Will Schwalbe, the editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books, were eating oysters in Grand Central Terminal and complaining about ill-considered e-mails they had recently received, and even sent. Before long, they found themselves cobbling together a system of proper usage and protocol. Now, with the publication of their book “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home,” they have put themselves forward as the genre’s Strunk and White.

Shipley and Schwalbe enumerate six essential e-mail types (the Ask, the Answer, Grovelling, etc.), eight deadly sins (too casual, too vague, too illegal, etc.), and a four-step checklist (S.E.N.D.) that reflects the authors’ broad-ranging e-mail conservatism. “S” stands for simple, “E” for effective, “N” for necessary, “D” for done. Generally, they’d have you hit “send” later and less often. They offer a hermeneutics of the cc, an invocation against the word “please,” and a number of rather chilling but by now self-evident rules (“Never forward without permission, and assume everything you write will be forwarded”). The reader gulps at the thought of unexploded self-incriminations ticking in servers around the world. The authors, astonishingly, come out in favor of exclamation points (“ ‘Thanks!!!!’ is way friendlier than ‘Thanks’ ”), abbreviations (“Is LOL... really inherently more opaque than FYI?”), and emoticons (those smiley faces and the like may “bug many people but they make us smile”).

Each author considers the other to be the best e-mailer he knows. “Talk about a great e-mailer!” Shipley wrote in an e-mail last week. “Mr. Schwalbe is too kind. He’s really the best. On top of that, he always manages to refresh his Subject Lines.” But they acknowledge that they are hardly perfect. Last week, for example, an attempt to reach Shipley by e-mail resulted in silence; he was on vacation in Germany, and his out-of-office autoreply had failed to deploy. Still, summoned by fax, he eventually joined an e-mail three-way, noting, nonetheless, that such an arrangement was perhaps less expedient than a conversation via instant messaging or telephone. Shipley and Schwalbe maintain that different media suit different circumstances. Condolence e-mails, for example, are insufficient on their own. Follow up with a letter. And, Shipley says, “E-mail apologies are inherently lame.” The reader gulps again.

Let the record show that neither man is a proponent of the “respond in portions” approach to answering—that practice of cutting the first e-mail into bits and taking on each item in turn. “One of my problems with it is that it can so easily devolve into barked commands,” Schwalbe wrote. “You start by writing interstitial comments like ‘Good idea, but maybe we should . . .’ and before you know it, you are writing things like ‘No’ or ‘That won’t work at all.’ ”

They both use “Dear ___” unfailingly. Schwalbe is an “All best!” man, whereas Shipley goes with “Cheers.” They hold that you should address recipients by their last names unless invited otherwise, explicitly or implicitly (see “mirroring”), and they disdain intemperance and reprimand. As e-mailers, both men, in keeping with their positions near but not quite at the top of their respective food chains, are cordial and politic, and they were astounded by the lack of tact exhibited by Bush Administration officials in their e-mail discussions over the firing of eight “underperforming” federal prosecutors. What could they have been thinking?

“They were thinking about a lot of things, clearly, but they weren’t thinking about e-mail,” Shipley wrote. “Their brains stopped telling them that they were putting their words and ideas down in indelible digital ink. I can’t think of anything more dangerous.”

The brains of Shipley and Schwalbe—or, for that matter, of anyone who reads “Send”—will likely never be so susceptible. As the e-mails went to and fro last week, seeming occasionally even to cross each other on their trip across (or is it under?) the ocean, the correspondents’ attention to indelibility seemed unwavering.

“This is fun but very meta!” Schwalbe wrote:

I realize I’m discussing something while I’m doing that very thing. You know how DVDs come with "Director’s Commentary" tracks. It’s like I’m recording one of those tracks WHILE directing instead of after!
Again, so many thanks!!!
All best!
Will ♦

....................

Not to be outdone (yes — I am quite aware that the phrase previous is a non sequitur but I just felt like it — and it's my blog), John Derbyshire — author, most recently, of "Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra" — reviewed the same book in the April 21, 2007 Wall Street Journal.

His closing sentence: "All the more reason to welcome this handy little vade mecum, written with concision and good sense.

Derbyshire's review follows.

To: Emailers

Subject: Etiquette

One of the basic rules of good manners hammered into me at an early age was: Don't impose! If one were to see a famous person in the street, for instance, it would be quite wrong to impose on that person's time and privacy by introducing oneself.

It often seems to me that advances in personal-communications technology consist mainly of new ways for us to impose on each other. The cellphone, obliging us to hear one half of other people's conversations, is the most egregious case. Email is not far behind in making new, often unwanted demands on our attention and time.

To be sure, some emails are a proper part of our daily work. Many just replace phone calls or paper mail. Many others, however — especially, as the Journal's own Jared Sandberg has noted in his Cubicle Culture column, those that come to us because our name is on someone's "cc" list or part of a "reply to all" response — are impositions.

In "Send," David Shipley and Will Schwalbe offer us help in separating the useful from the impositional and in making the useful more so. A combination stylebook and etiquette manual for email users, "Send" covers all the human, nontechnical aspects of email, from the use of "emoticons" (those little faces made up of punctuation symbols) to the legal perils of incautious emailing.

All the vexing matters that have crossed the mind of every emailer at one time or another are fully covered here. Should you use "urgent" flags? No, say the authors, nor the highly irritating "notify sender" box. Is it OK to put your entire message in an email subject line, text-message-wise? Yes, but close with EOM — "end of message" — so that the recipient won't waste time opening the empty email. How to apologize for a tardy reply to someone's email? Five different formulas are offered, with some words of encouragement: "Like you, that person [the one you've neglected to answer] probably has an overflowing email inbox.... Enough people are feeling sufficiently overwhelmed that there exists a wellspring of understanding if you have failed to answer in a timely way." Some of the advice is of universal applicability, though it is none the less needed for that. "Once you've made the move to first names . . . it is a mistake to go back to more formal address." And, of course: "Be brief."

Is email having any deep social or historical consequences? I can't say I think so, and "Send" offers nothing that suggests so. Of their "Seven Big Reasons to Love Email," only Reason No. 4 — "Email gives you a searchable record" — offers anything new over phone calls, paper letters and conversation. Even that advantage has a downside, as the chapter on legal perils explains. I note that my own children do not use email much, preferring instant messaging. Perhaps the whole thing is a transient phenomenon.

The "send" button itself is of course the greatest enemy of prudent and considerate emailing; our tendency to click on it without thinking is the source of much annoyance (if we're lucky) and embarrassment (if we're not). At the end of "Send," the authors reveal that their title is intended as an acronym, guiding us to better emailing. Messages should be Simple, Effective, Necessary and aimed at getting something Done. (That last applies to workplace email, not notes to family and friends.)

Not bad advice. I wish that Messrs. Shipley and Schwalbe had not included some brief lessons on how to impose: "When making a large request of someone's time, it can be helpful to propose a much smaller request first." Helpful to whom? I think, too, that their list of "Big Moments in Email History" ought to have noted that computer-science guru Donald Knuth gave up email in 1990, a point in time at which the rest of us had only just heard of it.

Most of us are now beyond giving email up, even if we wanted to. All the more reason to welcome this is a handy little vade mecum, written with concision and good sense.