Don't Send the Wrong Message

A Naples woman made her living as a writer, but when it came to e-mails, she didn’t bother with good form. She rarely opened with a greeting—no Dear or Good morning or even Hi. She didn’t care enough to spell or punctuate properly. A typical example: "did you get my message i ’l be laate sory gotta run."

To at least one client, that slapdash style implied she was too busy to be bothered with details—which cast doubts about her work from the start.

 

The too-busy tone is a common e-mail blunder in the workplace, I learned from local workers I surveyed.

It won’t get you arrested or entangled in a lawsuit—or cause public outrage, as when someone in the Lee County Sheriff’s Office forwarded a racially charged cartoon to co-workers. It won’t be water cooler gossip, as when a man asked a recently jilted co-worker for breakup advice. And it won’t put people at risk, as when the White House reportedly sent out a trip manifest that included reporters’ Social Security, passport and other private information.

In comparison, a poorly written e-mail doesn’t seem much of a blunder at all.

"A lot of people just don’t think [proofreading e-mails] is worth it. They don’t realize that they’ve made a mistake, or just don’t pay attention to detail," says Lydia Ramsey, a business-etiquette author, speaker and trainer based in Savannah, Ga. "Or we send [it] before we remember we’re supposed to be checking it."

In any event, careless communication is among the surest ways to tarnish your professional reputation. The Naples writer I mentioned lost her job with that client partly as a result of her messy missives. And Ramsey says she wouldn’t give a reference to someone from whom she received sloppy e-mails.

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