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Even before the advent of the World Wide Web popularly known as WWW in 1989, email (acronym for electronic mail) had become the most popular means of both formal and informal communication, in organizations that had intranets. Today it is the world’s most preferred means of communication followed by mobile phones based verbal and written communications(SMS’s), simply because it is ”cheaper and faster than a letter, less intrusive than a phone call and less hassle than a fax”
Email has been blamed for the decline of the art of letter writing as masses now no longer write long letters to their dear ones or write applications and business letters on paper and post them. Leave alone this some intellectuals held emails and SMS’s responsible for distorting the language.
Well that may be true to some extent but the fact is that email, like the internet, has made and continues to make significant contribution to the development of languages, cultures, business and international understanding, and dissemination of information at an amazing speed.
Today it has been accepted even by formal educational bodies like CBSE etc. that no aspect of modern civilization can be without email and of course its carrier the internet. Thus, CBSE has included email in the school curriculum in place of things like notices, messages and memorandums etc. as a mark of acceptance of this source of communication.
Some useful guidelines that one must follow to write an email so as to maintain its superiority on other means of communication by countering the attacks on it by some conservative custodians of the languages
Styles of the emails
Emails, like their predecessors, letters, can be formal as well as informal. Companies, organizations, government departments and offices use formal email messages, which are written like formal letters for formal communication although such communication within an organization can be quite informal also, too, because people working there know each other
Informal emails are personal communication between friends, relatives and in many cases, even acquaintances, too and are written in a friendly and conversational style.
Language used in the emails
While the language of emails, like that of text message, contains a lot of contractions, abbreviations, slang expressions and some time the offensive words and expressions also of real life, care should be taken to avoid them in mail messages.
Note:- Conventions like greetings, salutation, leave taking and closing remain more or less the same as in letter writing except that most email messages significantly curtail or abbreviate them or sometimes even leave them out, especially in personal messages which run in to a chain.
An effective email message must:
An email message must not:
