The following article by Mark Powell is taken from the MacMillan Education on-line teaching resource site.

e-loud and clear

Let's face it, email is an accident. It's as if a business letter went on a blind-date with a private phone call, drank a little too much, one thing led to another and ... Yes, well you get the picture.

As the offspring of this romantic entanglement, email is half documentation, half conversation. So before you click "send", you'd better read it aloud.

For email is not about keyboard skills. True, if you meant to write "Hello Jim, are those figures ready yet?" but in your haste missed the "o" off "hello", you may upset Jim. But what really matters is how you sound, not how you spell. Never mind the typos, get the tone right.

So, before you go rattling off your next email, ask yourself, does this sound:

Too familiar? "Dear" is always safe, "Hi" a little chummier, "Hiya" a bit too jaunty and "Yo!" completely off the scale. "Well done" - yes. "Way to go"- no. Aim for a register that e-writing guru Dianna Booher calls "business casual".

Too stuffy? As well as killing off the usual suspects - long-winded noun phrases (bores) and passives (cowards) - also steer clear of discourse markers of more than two syllables: "Plus" rather than "Moreover".

Too nice? Politeness (depending on how you say it) can sound like sarcasm. So skip the likes of "Would you mind", "Thank you so much", "If its's not too much trouble", "Excuse me for asking" and "Please explain". "Please" in particular is a devious little word. We're taught to use it liberally, but in print it can sound rather finicky.

Think of email as another kind of voice mail and all you have to do is find the right voice.