by April J.

Created on: May 10, 2011

For millions of years, the human race survived without email. Our early ancestors were kept busy with other activities that didn't involve clogging each others' Inboxes with spam, for example finding or catching food, staying warm, and fighting off enemies. Of all these early activities, one of the most important involved building the extremely complex communication system that has kept humanity alive this long. Language is a part of this system of course, and ours is extremely complex, however language is a small part of human communication. The rest of it is made up of non-verbal queues – things like facial expression, eye contact, body movements, gestures, vocal tone and pitch. These non-verbal queues are extremely important and play a huge role in communication.

So how does all of this relate to email? After we had spent millions of years honing our verbal and non-verbal communication, along came email about 20 years ago and quickly became a huge part of our lives and our communication, from work to play to commerce. This new method presents some new challenges – a huge one being that it is devoid of those non-verbal queues that humans love to rely on. Without these queues, extra pressure is put on the words themselves. They must convey all of the meaning to the reader, and this meaning must be clear and unambiguous. When it isn't, this is when misunderstandings arise.

Proper words and grammar are essential for conveying meaning in an email, but this is only part of the picture when it comes to email etiquette. Another part involves controlling the picture that you paint of yourself as the sender, because when we can no longer decide what we think of a person by looking at them and listening to them, we will find other ways to paint ourselves a picture of who they are. Instead of looking at what they wear, we will look at how they spell, how polite they are in their email, and whether they greet us properly. An email with poor spelling, wild fonts and disjointed grammar paints the picture of an uneducated, disorganized person, and may make what they say less credible. An email that is friendly, polite and well-polished does the opposite – increasing good feelings about the sender and likely giving their message more credibility.

One of the fascinating thing about human language is that it is fluid and ever-changing. Like us, our language evolves constantly to adapt to our environment and our technology. Words like "Google", "spam" and

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>