Email Etiquette Script
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This document provides email best practices and guidelines for professional workplace email use. It discusses maintaining separate personal and work email accounts, complying with FERPA regulations, using descriptive subject lines, being careful when replying to all or using distribution lists, avoiding distracting formatting and text speak, using signatures sparingly, and sharing large files externally rather than attaching to emails. Proper email etiquette is emphasized to communicate effectively and efficiently in a professional context.
Email Etiquette Script
- 1. Introduction
- 3. Who needs this information? Well, well all do. With email being so pervasive, it never hurts to have a little reminder about how to best utilize this tool, especially in the workplace.
- 4. Work vs Personal accounts
- 5. This presentation will focus on email best practices and procedures in the workplace. Most of these are transferrable to personal email accounts as well.
- 6. I will be using humorous images and such from the internet to illustrate my point. Please feel free to laugh!
- 7. I highly suggest having a personal account separate from your work email. Things like jokes and religious or politically charged forwards are more appropriate from a personal account to other personal accounts, though you might consider being very selective about what you send out lest you offend or annoy anyone.
- 8. If you do forward emails along, make sure they are appropriate
- 10. FERPA - Family Education Rights and Privacy Act
- 11. guarantees them the right to inspect and review their education records, the right to seek to amend education records, and the right to have some control over the disclosure of information from those education records
- 12. What does this mean for you?
- 13. If the student has not restricted access to directory (or public) information you may release limited information, including name, contact information, enrollment status and so on. If a student has blocked release of directory information, you may not release any information about that student.
- 14. Some information should not be given without written consent including grades, GPAs, details of registration information, credit information, and so on. For more information, see the FERPA links on your handout.
- 15. Recipients
- 16. Subject Line
- 17. Be sure to use a descriptive subject line. A whole inbox full of the same email, or emails without subject lines at all can be difficult to view.
- 18. CC vs BCC – Carbon Copy vs Blind Carbon Copy
- 19. If you are emailing something to a long list of people, it is useful to use BCC. This not only protects the emails of everyone on your list, but also prevents any “reply all” incidents.
- 20. Reply All
- 21. Has anyone seen the superbowl commercial where the guy thinks he’s hit ‘reply all’ on an email? *play movie*
- 22. The easiest way to avoid such terror is to be very careful about hitting reply all, as well as responding to d-list emails. Always check to make sure the person(s) you intend the email to reach are the only ones in the To (and copy) fields.
- 23. In the event that you send an email to an unintended recipient, you can email to apologize – but again, avoid if sending to the d-list or a large group of people.
- 24. D-Lists
- 25. Use the distribution lists with extreme caution and trepidation. Make sure you choose the right d-list so that the information you are sending gets to the right group, and insure that it is true college business
- 26. To the best of your ability, make sure the email you send is right the first time – nothing is more frustrating than someone sending out countless follow up emails to fix mistakes.
- 27. For d-list tips, see the Help Desk’s page; the link is in your handout.
- 28. Formatting
- 29. Design and Templates aka Email is not a place to decorate
- 30. You should probably avoid using the templates in Outlook, especially those with colored and distracting backgrounds.
- 31. Hard to read, especially for people with low vision or certain forms of color blindness.
- 32. ALL CAPS = yelling
- 33. Avoid typing in all capital letters. If you’re not a great typist, default to all lowercase. All capital letters is INTERPRETED AS YELLING.
- 34. Signature
- 35. Having a signature is a good idea. You can include your name, title, and best contact information.
- 36. Having a signature that includes EVERY possible way to contact you, favorite quotes, and other irrelevant information should probably be avoided
- 38. When used sparingly, emoticons can actually help set the tone of your email. Stick with basic smiley faces, but since tone is difficult to convey over email, an emoticon might help.
- 39. Remember that I say sparingly. A ton of emoticons all over the place is not going to help anybody.
- 40. In professional email, avoid ‘textspeak’ or commonly unknown acronyms. In your personal email, LOL away
- 41. File Sharing
- 42. If you have an attachment to share with your colleagues, especially if there are several people or you’d like to include it to a d-list, consider placing the file on shared disk space, sharepoint, or an online file storage space like Google Docs that would allow everyone to view.
- 43. Only one copy of the document exists, so if multiple people are going to provide input or make changes, you don’t have to keep passing around edited documents
- 44. It saves the college email servers tons and tons of space – you won’t get the warning to clean your email out as often, people on d-lists won’t be annoyed by your attachment, and server administrators won’t hunt you down in the night.
- 45. Final Thoughts Before I Bore You
- 46. Keep it brief – give your email careful thought and consideration. Less is more is an appropriate mantra with email.
- 48. Only print emails that you need – there is no reason to print out every email you get; it will help the college save money and our environment.