There are many good reasons to use email (text messaging and text chat sessions) but quite as many good reasons not to. My considered opinions, after twenty years of use, leads to the following suggestions in which, for the most part, I do not distinguish the various instant or near-instant text modalities. I’ll call all of them ITMs (immediate text modalities).
Unlike even the humble phone (or VOIP/SKYPE) ITMs all lack affect (emoticons are no substitute). So it is very hard to determine if a writer is angry or shy, indifferent or precise, jocular or grimly serious. I’ve seen grants turned down because an additive American “quite =very” was read as a subtractive English “quite=not so much”. I’ve seen jokes go badly wrong and employees self-destruct because of a missing “not” in an email.
There is very little room for error correction (this is a little better in a chat room than it is in email). In ordinary speech you can interject politely, in an ITM you play ping pong; and, as we all know, it is likely that only the first or last part of the ITM is read, let alone digested.
The I in ITM leads to a lovely sense of having finished a task and makes for a fine way of “burying the news” (as the habit of sending out important but contentious announcements late on a Friday is called in the press and politics). Have you noticed how many important things arrive by email on, or just before, a weekend or a longer holiday?
The sender is now virtuous and the receiver is left to stew.
Just saving an ITM makes it seem as if things are under control.
The very ease of composing an ITM decreases the value it carries; apparently one in six teenagers has broken up a relationship with a text message.
So what are my conclusions?
ITMs are great to:
Confirm meetings.
Set up phone calls or face-to-face visits.
Ask or answer one question; OK, maybe two.
Provide a polite reminder of a task undone or a promise unfulfilled.
Send stuff that does not really matter; a link to an article you think cool but the recipient may or may not give a damn about; jokes that you think hilarious (as long as the recipient may not think them insulting); and the like.
Sending good news saying that details follow or are attached (even a PDF takes more effort and will be better composed and edited).
Burying the news.
ITMs are rotten for
Serious reference letters.
Asking several things at the same time.
Answering several things at the same time.
Sending bad news.
Doing anything nuanced that demands interaction, gesture, intonation, accent and so on.
In the former case, fire away. In the latter, if you can’t do things in person then:
Write a careful letter and FAX it. This gets more attention and is more likely to be filed properly as we still do not live in a paperless world.
Try to use the phone or, better yet, a video conference. This is no longer expensive or difficult.
Break your long email into three, or whatever number is appropriate, shorter ones and send them on different days or at least at different times.
In any case,
Consider not responding immediately. Most things can wait a day and will be better for it. (In this I preach better than I practise.) One thing I know for sure, it is better to compose email in a word processor or text editor and to read it as if you were the recipient before considering sending your message.
At the very least, take the time to extract the part of the ITM you are responding to so that the annoying quote marking >>>>> and the like is avoided. Give your message a decent title not ‘Re: Re: Re: something unrelated’ or so old it no longer has meaning. Each time you reply there is a good chance you send longer-and-longer, and less-and-less comprehensible, junk files. Like all rules, this has exceptions; keeping the old title helps with threaded discussions.
Making a list of email aliases cuts back the bad habit of writing a new message by ‘replying’ to some old message. One frequent side effect of the bad habit is unintended extra recipients and an utterly inappropriate subject line.
Be careful of that subject line. Titles should reflect reality. I get email from coauthors with title such as "Bad error in ms", when they mean "Missing hyphen on page 7".
Never send an attachment without providing a plain text description of what it is. Try to name your attachment to assist the recipients. Why call your attachment mypaper6.12.pdf or something equally meaningless to an editor or other recipient? I particularly loathe word documents sent with “The whole first line of this January 2007.doc.” as their title.
Consider placing a long attachment on a web page and sending only the URL. This will avoid problems with size limits and with file type restrictions such as on .zip files. What with the proliferation of visual spam, this is all the more important for media files. If you are concerned about security, get someone to help you to set up a pass-worded directory.
Placing your reply at the end of the long message to which you are responding is a potential disaster, especially if your letter is read in a different mailer from the one it was written in. Your reply may well be hidden by HTML strings or a list of attachments to the original message. Not everyone uses your mailer or your operating system.
Just so, read each message sent to you with care and with awareness of the missing affect. I once came close to losing a friendship until I realized that my friend’s first language was French and that the insulting words were not at all insulting once that was taken into account.