Editors' Rating
Published: 03 Aug 2007
Back in 1959, a New Yorker writer named E. B. White (later more famous for writing the children's book Charlotte's Web) revised a slim volume written in 1918 by William Strunk, his former Cornell University professor. Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is still in print, and still very much the bible of good writing among the class of writers who aspire to contribute to top US publications like New Yorker. It's in that class that David Shipley and Will Schwalbe belong: Shipley is an editor at the New York Times and Schwalbe is editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books. Send: The How, Why When, and When Not of Email is their joint attempt at writing what probably should have been titled The Elements of Email.
However: The Elements of Style dealt only with writing, not interaction, and so Send has a second set of roots. Long before Miss Manners began writing her syndicated column for US newspapers, there were books about etiquette written by experts with upper-class names like Amy Vanderbilt and Emily Post. These books advised on the fine points of social behaviour, such as who should offer to shake hands first, or how much time you had to write thank-you notes. It was in that sort of book that you might have read, in 1964, the advice never to send immediately a letter you'd written while you were angry, but to set it aside and reread it a few days later with a cooler head. And here in Send, we find this advice again, only in a much more urgent form, since we no longer have the built-in delays of finding an envelope and a postage stamp.
Ask yourself, say Shipley and Schwalbe, whether it's really worth upsetting the social structure by expressing your anger. And if you must write out your feelings, at least do it away from your email software safely in a word processor window, where you can't accidentally hit the send button. Remember: your outburst can be mass-forwarded and ruin your life!
The authors put a lot of thought into the delicacies of cc'ing, the acceptability of grammatical errors, when to use words like 'disinterested' (when you mean objective and impartial, not when you mean 'uninterested'), why not to use words like 'irregardless' (they don't exist) and how 'please' can become an insult. Watch out for contractions and capitals; consider the fine meanings of punctuation.
All of this is interlaced with amusing stories culled from media reports and personal experience. Read about the lawyer who ruined his career with an email message of just three words, and the flame war that erupted over a single missing full stop. Shipley and Schwalbe even tackle how to avoid writing email that can land you in jail.
This is the sort of book that sounds as though it's just begging to be mocked. In fact, it's better than you might expect. Even if you grew up with email, the nuances of language may have escaped you, especially when you're trying to bridge the gap to older generations who grew up with letters and phone calls.
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