James Wilding | Ruby on Rails Developer

Emails Are Not Letters

Here’s an article from the BBC about the decline of “Dear” as a lead-in to emails, and here’s a quote from Jean Broke-Smith (an etiquette teacher), taken from the article:

If you’re sending a business e-mail you should begin “Dear…” - like a letter. You are presenting yourself. Politeness and etiquette are essential.

One of the problems people have with genuinely new technology is that it’s difficult to categorise. The first cars were “horseless carriages”: try making that comparison now and see if it holds up (who knows what the first aeroplanes were likened too: maybe a machine that could fly was too new to be “like” anything, even in the early days). In my social network at least, Facebook (when it was just getting going) was “like MySpace” — only better.

We make these conceptual links between old and new because it helps us to understand things we’re not familiar with. Take your knowledge of how letter-writing work and use it as a starting point for understanding email, the argument goes. This approach works — up to a point.

Writing an email is like writing a letter in that, well, you’re writing; and more than that, you’re writing to someone, so of course etiquette does matter. But email etiquette and letter etiquette are not the same thing.

Starting an email with “Dear” makes you sound old-fashioned, precisely because you’re taking the etiquette of letter-writing and applying it too rigidly to email. Now, some would say that it’s better to be too formal than too informal. This is true up to a point, but “Dear” is still very formal for an email; it’s really too formal, because it’s a habit of letter-writing that hasn’t carried over to emails.

Email is a modern tool and has modern problems, but beyond all the spam, all the junk, and all the forwarded crap, lies the main advantage of the medium: fast, accessible, informal communication with few limits. This is why we love it: because we don’t have to go through rounds of “Dear James” and “warm regards”; because we can get right down to what’s important without having to go through the formalities first.

This is why you can justifiably start a first email with “Hi”.

We can afford to be informal in emails because the gap between sending a message and getting a reply is small. This makes an email conversation more like a spoken conversation and as you probably know, you don’t need to start a spoken conversation with a formal greeting.

When I was younger, a teacher of mine gave me a great piece of advice: being “polite” means making the people you’re with feel comfortable. It’s not about rules, it’s not about strict etiquette: treating people with respect means learning to fit it. If everyone who sends you an email is kicking things off with “hi”, then it’s time to drop the “Dear sir”.

Image by Loving Earth on Flickr