More Netiquette!
Okay, apparently I didn’t even scratch the surface of my pet peeves in an earlier column. So I think I’ll address them one at a time – beginning, today, with one of the most obvious.
Subject lines.
If you’re on an e-list, or even if you’re simply sending emails, the subject line you choose may make the difference between whether your message is caught by a spam filter or not, or whether it is read by its intended recipient or not.
A recent plea for assistance with a technical matter on an e-list to which I belong had this subject line: “Please help.”
Wow. That’s clear. Not only does it sound resoundingly like spam, it tells me nothing about the subject of the email. You want help, you make sure that the rest of the sentence is in the subject line: “Need help accessing old files,” for example.
I cannot say how many times a day I receive an email with a subject line that reads, “From Bob” (obviously, insert name of choice instead of my randomly chosen “Bob”). You didn’t notice the From line, folks? The subject of your email is the fact that you are writing to me?
I receive, easily, over 400 emails a day. I do a lot of subject-line scanning. I know I’ve probably lost valuable information from time to time because of bad subject lines. And I very much doubt that I’m alone in this.
Please please please write a real subject line (i.e., something that refers to the actual topic of your email) in the subject line space, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Doing the Right Thing, About Writing, Words on December 13th, 2007