08.25.08 Blog Under Construction

Please excuse this mess while we update our blog over the next few days. It will be worth the wait.

Thanks, 
Ed

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06.01.08 The Gloom of Night (Part I)

“Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion
of their appointed rounds.”

Welcome to My Blog
Each week, I will include some tips and tricks you may use to improve your writing. Thousands more appear in GrammaRight.

Let’s start with …
How to Write Better Emails
Perhaps neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night deters our trusted postal workers from delivering the mail, but computer crashes, disk-drive collapses, and other horrors sometimes prevent your email from arriving at its appointed destination. And often things you do and write in your emails thwart your purpose of communicating effectively with friends, family, clients, and colleagues.

Email or E-Mail?
Right off the bat, let’s tackle a spelling issue: According to leading dictionaries, you may spell email like this: email, e-mail, or even E-mail. I opt for email for one very good reason: By omitting the hyphen, I don’t have to worry about the word wrapping at the end of a line and leaving the “e-“ on a line by itself. So in this column, email it is.

Billions and Billions
So how many emails go out each day around the globe? Here’s the answer from About.com: “Statistics, extrapolations, and counting by Radicati Group from the first quarter of 2006 estimate the number of emails sent per day to be around 171 billion.” This means that nearly two million emails go out every second of every day. Unfortunately, more than 70% of them are spam and viruses. But you can count yourself as one of the 1.1 billion people who regularly use email … legitimately. 

Quality Counts
So you use email legitimately, typically in your business or school. But what about the quality of the emails you send? How often do you get emails with improper grammar, sloppy spelling, little or no punctuation, zero capitalization, and a total lack of paragraphing?

And what message do you send your clients, customers, colleagues, boss, or lover if your emails suffer from the many deficiencies I plan to review in this article? Visit Grammar.com next week, and we’ll start our review of how to write better emails. 

Stay tuned.
Ed Good
Developer of GrammaRight

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