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By Dr.
Philip Baczewski, Director of Academic Computing and User Services
Call it a pet peeve, but the easiest
way to get me to delete an e-mail message without reading it is to
preface it with "best viewed as html." If you want me to view HTML,
send me a URL. Otherwise, just type your message as e-mail text.
I don't know who had the bright idea of integrating html and e-mail,
but it probably originated with those web browsers that had e-mail
clients built in. Some may see an advantage to being able to format
their mail using different fonts or colors or being able to include a
picture. But it seems to me that it is not the best use of the e-mail
medium.
E-mail is all about information, not about presentation. At least,
that's my opinion based upon over 20 years of using and supporting
e-mail. Insisting on imposing your presentation in e-mail is
counterproductive.
Perhaps this is why many students think that "e-mail
is for old people." According to a Chronicle of Higher Education
article,
teenagers "like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to
friends and use e-mail to communicate with 'old people.'" I may
qualify as an "old person," but I think that what young people really
want is the immediacy of information. Couching that information in a
graphical marketing shell is, then, an interference to communication
rather than an enhancement of it.
Perhaps the other problem with effective e-mail communication is that
we've lost some of the art of written communication. I've touched on
this in a past
column but it's been long enough that it's may be time to revisit
this issue. Even recently, I've heard the lament that "you wouldn't
get that [in this case a love poem] in an e-mail." I'm not sure that
e-mail is the most appropriate medium for a love poem, but it
certainly would transmit one. The question really is if anyone is
still inclined to write love poems.
So, maybe it's time to reach even farther back into the archives and
talk about e-mail
etiquette. Or just remember this simple e-mail rule: say what you
mean completely and clearly using the gift of language that
distinguishes us from those other animals roaming the planet. Your
menu won't sound any tastier in HTML. Your event date will not be any
more available in a fancy font. Your .pub file is not even readable by
most of the world, so why do you think that was in any way
communication?
Student's attitude toward e-mail is that it's more formal and less
immediate than chat or text messaging. That's exactly how people used
to think about paper memos versus e-mail when e-mail was a new
technology to most. What hasn't changed is that what's important is
the content and not the medium. HTML-formatted e-mail doesn't improve
the information (the old saying about lipstick on a pig comes to
mind). So, write a good e-mail next time and make your words more
important than your background color.
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