Rant Professionalism in work emails & correspondence.

[Raven]

This is starting to be a bit of a pet hate for me, people using Americanisms or generally poor spelling and grammar in work emails. I cringe every time a certain colleague sends an email because the punctuation is all over the place and the spelling is the standard of an 8 year old.

Now I am a pretty crap speller and I could improve a fair amount on my overall grammar but when it comes to work related correspondence I take great care that the spelling is correct and that it makes sense to read it, spell checking every email before it sent goes a long way towards this.

Its not something that is unique to my company either, I get emails from our customers and suppliers and some of the spelling is terrible, do people not know that outlook has a built in spell checker and that you can change it to English (UK) ? Whether its just me but I consider an email or a letter to be the modern day first impression much of the time, people really should take greater care when sending them, work is not facebook!

/rant off

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

You'll like this then: "Office professionalism" seems to have no bearing on freedom of speech...just as long as you use the right typeface. on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

EDIT: Hmm some FH code getting in the way but the link works.

 

[Sparx]

oh i agree i hate people who use too much abbreviations and slang etc in emails especially work emails

I always word my emails

<Name>

text

regards
<myname>
<title>
<location>

You never know who is going to read that email or anything, unless of course its to mates and we are having a natter about something

 

[Chilly]

Frankly, most of the people where I work send emails that are perfectly readable - except the foreigners. It's not prejudice, it's a fact. It can take me 50% longer to digest a poorly worded email from one of our foreign employees who has poor written (and probably spoken) English.

 

[ST^]

My main gripe is the lack of punctuation people will type what should be two or three sentences and not put any commas or full stops in it and without a pause my mind wanders and I can't really work out what they were trying to tell me it is really annoying.

 

[Exioce]

I don't mind the odd Americanism in work emails, as I work in IT they are quite common. There is no excuse for poor grammar however.

 

[Ch3tan]

All these things annoy me too. You are spot on with the spell checker, so many people have it set to English (US).

 

[Ctuchik]

My main gripe is the lack of punctuation people will type what should be two or three sentences and not put any commas or full stops in it and without a pause my mind wanders and I can't really work out what they were trying to tell me it is really annoying.

ahaha, i see what you did there

/edit: one thing that fucks me right off is people that feel the need to Capitalise The First Letter In Every Fucking Word They Write!

i can take any amount of typos, but that particular thing just grinds my balls....

 

[Tom]

I don't mind the odd Americanism in work emails, as I work in IT they are quite common. There is no excuse for poor grammar however.

rofl.

 

[old.Tohtori]

If it's readable, i don't give a f'ck

 

[SilverHood]

Raven, you're not the only one. I hate it when people can't string together a few sentences properly. It reflects poorly on the person who wrote the email, their team, their manager, their department and the company overall.
After all, if they can't hire someone who can write properly, why should you do business with them?

I work in America, so Americanisms are unfortunately quite common

Bosses love emails they can just forward ad verbatim, very good for career prospects I've found

 

[MYstIC G]

I always word my emails

<Name>

text

regards
<myname>
<title>
<location>

Ditto, except we put Kind Regards on ours (damn Jonty!) and the legally required VAT registration details, etc. afterwards.

We also decided to leave off telephone numbers as we found that when they were on the e-mails you'd send someone a message and get a call 20 seconds later saying thanks for the e-mail. That's what the reply button is for!

 

[JingleBells]

Ditto, except we put Kind Regards on ours (damn Jonty!) and the legally required VAT registration details, etc. afterwards.

We also decided to leave off telephone numbers as we found that when they were on the e-mails you'd send someone a message and get a call 20 seconds later saying thanks for the e-mail. That's what the reply button is for!

We've a corporately mandated email signature that goes like:
Name | Job Title
Office Address I'm In
Tel | Mobile
email | coporate website
Full company name and registered numner
Registered address of company

Needless to say most people don't include it in single liner emails

 

[MYstIC G]

Thankfully as we're a family business I got to pick the e-mail so we're running google apps and oh how I love the "quoted text hidden" feature for those 1 line e-mails