Editor’s Corner
A Primer on Email Etiquette
E
VERY DAY, MORE THAN 200 BILLION emails are sent and re-
ceived, for an average of 122 emails sent and received, per user, in
a business setting.1 Having just returned from a week of vacation,
we believe that approximately all of those 200 billion emails were
waiting for us in our inboxes.
As we spend increasing amounts of our time reading, writing,
deleting, avoiding, or embracing these electronic missives, here
are our wholly opinionated recommendations for the best way to
approach the typed word, with apologies to a previous piece on
conference call etiquette.
1) Limit your message to three succinct points – and lead with
your best.
We love the rule of threes, which also applies to the number of
bullet points that should appear on a PowerPoint slide.
In the 1984 movie “Amadeus,” a fictionalized biography of
the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the curtain has just
fallen on the first performance of his opera, “The Abduction
From the Seraglio,” commissioned for the Holy Roma