Speaking of writing, what about e-mail?
We were just talking about doing a good job with your written products, because they are going to be around for a long time:
But the first time something goes out of your immediate group, or up the chain in your organization, spend the effort to make it as clean, tight, and clear as possible. Get your first draft done, and the main ideas captured, as quickly as possible if that’s your style, then edit, edit, edit.
“Except e-mail, right?” Nope, that too, and this does mean you.
Most of us spend a lot of time writing and reading e-mail, and most of us have our first experiences in e-mail communicating with our friends. In this respect e-mail sometimes resembles instant messages, and you may treat them interchangeably with regard to form: sentence fragments, abbreviations (LOL, IMHO, AFAIK, and others), inside jokes, obscure references (“it’s just a flesh wound”), and strange vocabulary are part of what has enabled us to convert a formerly rigid medium—the written word—into a powerful mechanism for building and sharing in communities with people we rarely or never actually see. This is wonderful and amazing.
Once you begin to have professional communications (whether related to your academic career or to life after school), however, these practices are out of place and damage your ability to communicate effectively with others to whom you are not so intimately connected by circumstance, age, and culture. If you are reading this site, the odds are pretty good that you’ve already started your professional life, even if you are still in school or working to complete your training. Now is the time to start breaking these habits of familiarity and informality.
I’m not suggesting that you sterilize your e-mail of all things personal and write with the formality you would employ on a final project paper in senior design. What I am suggesting is that you write in complete sentences with proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Spend a little time organizing your thoughts. If you aren’t sure, look up the difference between affect and effect before you hit the send key.
In much of the Western world we start e-mailing and texting in elementary school these days. It will probably take you a while to break your bad habits, so start now.
If you really feel that this will cramp your style in a particular social community to which you belong, divide your worlds. Get several e-mail addresses (there are dozens of free Web mail offerings out there) and use one for your informal communications and a different e-mail for everything else. This will get you in the mindset of having different writing styles for different contexts, and this will serve you well when you need to separate your work e-mail from your personal messaging.
