Hey I had an interesting discussion with a collegue of mine at work today on how should we handle e-mail replies. The way I currently do it is the SMS Style, aka the short, blunt and to the point method, however some people like my friends have pointed out to be to use more formal robotic style, aka the normal way companies send you e-mail where the beat around the bush, try to be your friend and you just might figure out what he / she is trying to say.

Jul 1, 2011

Category: Social

Posted by: reshwindblade

First off I would like to state my ideal preference when recieving or sending emails. I prefer to recieve E-mails like how I would talk naturally, which is more of the SMS Style but a bit better than it.

Yes the SMS style is easy to do, but there is one thing we must remember, in an E-mail no one can hear the tone of your voice, so when you say something however short, the person on the receiving end doesn't know if you are laughing while saying it, crying while saying it, having a serious tone while saying or maybe even joking while saying it. My college tells me it is now what we say in the E-mail, but how we say it. SMS style will help you clear your e-mails fast, but also at the cost the other guy might mis-interprete what you want to get accross.

The formal robotic style however I feel is much more worst, as it doesn't get straight to the point. It beats around the bush a little to much, and it feels like the e-mail was generated by a computer ( which in most cases it is ). Sometimes when the mail doesn't sound human / organic, the feeling to reply it is not there and you just might be put off by it.

So how when you want to reply your mails which path will you choose? For me if i had a choice between the 2 above I will go for the SMS style. However if the opportunity rises, I would like to combine both these styles together and create a 3rd stye. Basically the illegitamate child of SMS and Formal Robotic style. Even Mark Zuckerburg the founder of Facebook talked about this before, on how he feels when people use messaging system it shouldnt sound too robotic yet it should still maintain a certain degree of quality to it. After all the whole point of talking / messaging / e-mailing is to get a point accross, that is the outcome. Even if you sugar coat it, or strip it dry it is still the same, just that we got to be careful how we do it.