I came across Janet Malcolm’s interesting review of David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.  The title for this post comes from that review: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20571.  I haven’t seen the book itself, but, according to Malcolm, the two authors raise a few questions that relate very much not only to our shared (I hope) paranoia of misaddressing an email, but also to the nature of email as a communication practice.  To name just a few points the authors make:

1. “On email, people aren’t quite themselves.  They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous.  Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature” (qtd. in Malcolm).

2.  When you accidentally send an email containing negative comments about a person to that very person, do not use email to express your apology. “Just because we have email we shouldn’t use it for everything,” authors suggest.

3.  “If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed.  Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices and anxieties” (qtd. in Malcolm).  Malcolm then summarizes the authors’ suggestion to deal with this impersonal aspect of email —  ”a program of unrelenting niceness.  Keep letting your correspondent know how much you like and respect him, praise and flatter him, constantly demonstrate your puppyish friendliness, and stick in exclamation points (and sometimes even smiling face icons) wherever possible.’”

But exclamation points are really just shortcuts, which we must take because we simply can’t afford to do otherwise with the heavy volume of emails every day, the authors and Malcolm suggest.  Does email then propel weak writing?  At the end of her review, Malcolm poses a related question about young users of email: “Will their childish babbling evolve into decent writing?  Does writing a lot lead to writing well?”  My sense is if we write badly and do so often, we may lose or have a hard time acquiring the skills for writing well. 

With the tremendous number of electronic mediums for communication, perhaps we take shortcuts much too often, and so do our students.  Is there a way to discourage shortcuts or simply bad writing using the very medium that promotes it? Next time I teach composition, I will probably create prompts that would encourage students to correspond via email. Afterwards, in class the sender and the recipient can share their perceptions of the e-mail’s tone.  I think this use of a familiar and favorite medium might be a good way to help beginning writers develop a sense of audience, grow more sensitive to their choice of tone, and perhaps become stronger writers, and not just on email.