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Goodies to Go ™
April 10, 2000–Newsletter #75
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Please visit https://www.htmlgoodies.com
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Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,
I got one of the neatest things the other day. A Goodies
reader sent me a voice mail over ZDNet (www.zdnet.com). It’s
their new Onebox deal that lets you send and receive e-mail,
faxes, and voice mail. The Onebox converts voice messages to
a .wav or QuickTime audio file. The emailmail arrived with a
URL. I clicked on it and chose to hear the .wav version. I
listened to him ask his question. I thought that was pretty
cool.
I just ask that now that I’ve told you about it, that you
don’t fill my inbox with voice mail after voice mail. Thanks.
Did you hear…
No tax on the Net! That’s my battle cry these days.
Apparently I’m in line with the U.S. commission that will
make the decision. In a vote taken on March 30th, the ACEC
(Advisory Commission on Electric Commerce) voted 10 to 8 to
not tax business on the Net. Web business is currently under
a three-year moratorium of non-taxation. I have heard that
the committee is interested in extending that for another
five years. You’ve got my vote.
There was a hacker convention in Israel last week, the first
since the massive denial-of-service attacks on Yahoo and
E-bay a few months ago. There were over 350 attendees that
talked hacking, cracking, and the new software that will
allow it. Now we wait. Sooner or later, someone will want
to put all his or her new knowledge to work.
Does TV advertising work for dot.com businesses? Not from
the data being returned from the Super Bowl. Only 17% of
those surveyed could even name a dot.com that advertised
during the game. In fact, the site LifeMinders.com put
itself into the hole by spending the 2.8 million required to
advertise during the game. Barron’s reports that many dot.coms
have advertised themselves into so much debt that it’s pushing
them towards total bankruptcy.
Now onto today’s topic…
*****
You know what I luv about email????? It allows people to
express themselfs in a way that is cool and hip. IMHO, its
a frm of speech that everybody should do cuz’ its neet to
read!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your free to write what you want to
should write and say. my friends and me have been emailin’
for years. You know?!?!?!?!?!?!
K? C-ya!!!!! ;->
*****
Have you ever received an email that looked something like
this? When I get an email that comes up as convoluted as
this one, I like to take a moment and try to decipher what
was a mistake and what was intentionally done incorrectly.
Let’s see. If this were real, I would think that “luv”, “cuz”,
“emailin'”, “K”, and “C-ya” were all done on purpose. “IMHO”
are really initials that stand for “In My Humble Opinion”.
Another one I see a lot is “IIRC”, “If I Remember Correctly”.
Apparently the third sentence is very important. There are
15 exclamation points. I think the rule is that after seven
exclamation points, the line can officially be called really
important. After 20, it’s really, really important. I remember
when the big rule in email text was to not use all capital
letters because it was equal to yelling. What’s the difference
between all caps and 15 exclamation points?
I think the rest of the grammar mistakes could then be
chalked up to not paying attention in eighth grade English
class.
So, have you ever received an email that looked something
like this? I have. In fact, I receive them every day, and
it’s not just from students either. They come from business
people, other professors, and my Dad.
I’d like to say it bugs me to the point where I would say
something to the sender, but I rarely do. Don’t get me wrong,
I’m about as “Type A” as it gets, but email mistakes just
don’t bug me like I guess they should. Blatantly poor emails
from students sometimes get under my skin, but past that, a
mistake or two rarely bothers me enough to say anything.
I actually had to stop today and ask myself why I never
thought about it before.
If I had to put my finger on a reason, it would be that I
see email as a very informal kind of language. In my mind,
it’s equal to casual conversation, and casual conversation
is nothing like the English you would use to write an
academic paper (at least I hope it isn’t).
Casual conversation is full of sentence fragments, sentences
that don’t contain proper subjects, and slang. Casual
conversation between friends is fun. It’s a good time. You
make word shortcuts because you and your friend may only need
to say a word or two to communicate a broad meaning about
something or someone.
I would never talk to my boss like I would talk to my best
friend. That’s just not the way things work. When you’re
talking “up” in rank, you do clean up your English. You
move closer to that academic English format.
Formal letters are one thing, email is another.
Right?
Wrong! So says Kenneth Brown, an assistant professor at the
University of Iowa business school. He doesn’t like that
people don’t take the same time in creating an email letter
as speaking in person.
OK, I agree with that. I do not allow students to stand in
front of me and use poor English. I’m a communications
professor, for goodness sake. I would even think about
correcting a student in an email, but my friends? My
colleagues? My Dad?
Brown says he does.
Virginia Shea, who wrote the rules of Netiquette, says that
you will be judged by the quality of your writing in your
emails. She suggests we should all take the time to stop,
read, and correct our emails before we send them out.
Would we have time? I can barely answer all I have now, let
alone proof them all.
In a rebuttal to Dr. Brown’s statements, an employee at an
Internet start-up said that her poor emails are not
grammatical mistakes, but rather typos.
There’s a difference?
Apparently so. The Internet generation has taken casual
Friday to a whole new level. I about fell over when I toured
a new start-up and there were beds there in case any of the
workers decided he or she needed a nap after lunch. They take
things real easy, and their emails reflect that.
I’m the first to admit I don’t carefully read over my emails
before I send them, unless they are going to a person who is
in a power position. If I’m sending an email to another
professor in order to set up a quick meeting, I write it,
sign it, and send it.
When I read about people requesting that emails be proofed,
I decided to stop and read all of the emails I sent out this morning.
Wow. I’m a lousy typist.
So what’s to be done? The battle is going to come down to the
time factor versus good grammar. I’d like to say the grammar
will win, but I don’t know. People do not see email as a
permanent item like a memo or a journal (even though it is),
but rather as verbal communication. I did a survey a couple
of years back that reported the same thing. Email was seen
as far more verbal than written messages, even though it’s
fully text. People try to “talk” in their email. We’ve gone
as far as to imply emotion through little smiley faces in
the text.
But yet, typos still bother a lot of people. Let me tell you,
when there’s a typo on HTML Goodies, I get letters like crazy
telling me what and where the problem is. I especially like
the ones that seem to take pleasure in my having made a
mistake, and then have misspellings in their own email. I’ve
printed a couple of those to keep forever.
That got me thinking. I always make a point of looking at the
emails I put together for my higher-ups. I wonder if others do
the same. Professor Brown has made a broad, sweeping statement
that may or may not have merit. I would like to see a study
comparing emails people send to their equals (friends,
colleagues) and emails they send to those in a position of
power (bosses, managers). I would think that the emails sent
to those in a position of power would have less typos.
I say that because if people consider email more verbal than
written, then it would make sense that the pattern of using a
more proper form of email would follow using a more proper
form of verbal English. Anyone want to co-author? Shoot me an
email…but make sure you don’t misspell anything. ;->
(Smiley implying that was a tongue-in-cheek request.)
What other types of email might be prone to a higher level
of attention? Just for fun, I went to my “favorite flames”
directory to have a look at some of the flame emails I kept.
My favorite is the one where a woman gave me heck for being
pompous due to my using “Ph.D.” after my name. I kept it
because she used her own title following her name when she
signed the letter.
No typos. Hmmmm . . .
In fact, there weren’t a lot of typos in any of these letters.
Of course, many of the words only contained four letters, so
they were pretty easy to nail down. I’ll bet these letters
received a lot of attention to detail. I get mental pictures
of someone ranting around the room speaking their e-mail out
loud until they get just the right emotional punch out of
the words. These things were well edited, no doubt.
I also keep nice letters. There were some typos, not too many,
but still some. I guess when you’re writing something nice,
you’re more concerned about the meaning than the grammar.
Could that be it? Does a friendly email get less attention to
the English because it’s an equal to “Attaboy!”, “Way to go!”,
“You da man”?
I’ll bet there’s something to that. Either way, maybe it all
comes down to the person sending and the person receiving.
We people are way too complicated to make a general statement
that we’re all bad emailers. I’ll bet if we looked hard enough,
the amount grammatical mistakes in emails would bear out in
some way.
But the question still remains…should I correct my Dad’s
emails?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That’s that. I was told the other day that the number of
subscribers to this newsletter was just about to break to
200,000 mark. By now, it probably has. It’s humbling, let
me tell you. Thank you all so much for taking the time out
of your day to read it.
Joe Burns, Ph.D.
And Remember: Do you watch The Wizard of Oz when it comes on
every year? Did you ever wonder how the name Oz was created?
Apparently, the man who created the story, Frank Baum, was
trying to think of a name. He looked around the room for
inspiration when he spied a small filing cabinet with two
drawers marked A – N and O – Z. The rest is history. Pay no
attention to that man behind the curtain.