"A Vote For HUMAN Is a Vote For PEOPLE"
Tips For Writing Intelligible E-Mail
For those of us who have been writing e-mail since
the 1990s, it may seem obvious how to write an e-mail
message that's easy for the recipient to read
and understand. However, over the decades, the
content of electronic mail messages have generally
become more and more sloppy and difficult to understand.
To ensure that your e-mail has the greatest chance
of being read and taken seriously, it'll help to follow
a few simple tips:
- Do not use HTML mail. Stick to to plain text.
Use Content-Type text/plain, not
text/html. If you must use
HTML, please use Content-Type
multipart-alternative and include a
text/plain part.
- Use Usenet quoting,
as appropriate, to establish context.
Bottom-posting generally includes too much context, and
top-posting (
toilet paper quoting
) makes
context difficult to decipher, especially when mixed
with other quoting styles.
- Try to make your message well-organized and coherent.
Rambling, haphazardly-written messages are more difficult
to understand and more difficult to take seriously.
- Do not use Content-Transfer-Encoding base64
for anything other than binary attachments.
Try to avoid quoted-printable, too.
Wrap long lines so they're no more than 76 characters long,
and avoid using a space or tab as the last character on a line.
This will help avoid the need for your mailer to appply a
Content-Transfer-Encoding to your message.
- Try to avoid sending very large messages. If you need to send
a large file, consider sending a URL for it, instead.
- Try to avoid using run-on sentences, because they make your
writing more difficult to understand and demonstrate that what you're
writing is not well-organized and make you less likely to be taken
seriously and besides that run-on sentences, even, when, they,
include, lots, of, extra, commas, are, generally, still,
non-grammatical, whew!
- Take note when you are blind carbon-copied (BCC:'d)
on a message. If you receive a message, but you don't
appear on the To: or Cc: lines, then
you were probably blind carbon-copied. If you
reply to the other recipients of the message, you will reveal
that you were a BCC: recipient. Before doing so, you should
consider why the original sender might have included you
on the BCC: line, rather than overtly on the CC: line.
Warning:
Failure to pay attention to this may be embarassing!
- DO NOT WRITE ENTIRELY IN UPPERCASE.
- do not write entirely in lowercase.
Use appropriate punctuation, and try to remember
that e-mail messages and SMS text messages are not
the same thing.
- When using the Portable Document Format (PDF) file
format, try to avoid using rasterized PDFs, and try to
stick to text-selectable PDFs. They're not only more
useful, but also typically smaller.
- I can also read messages written in
reStructuredText,
Markdown, and
AsciiDoc.
So, feel free to send me messages in those
formats, as well.
- If you are concerned that someone unauthorized
might read your message, consider
encrypting it.
If you need to sign something you want to send me,
consider using a digital signature. You can find my
PGP key and fingerprint on the
contact page.
Yes, I realize that a lot of this ought to be
common knowledge, and that it shouldn't be necessary
to beg people to write intelligibly. Nevertheless,
I see lots and lots of really poorly-written e-mail.
So, I offer these tips in an effort to help those
who might need it.
What you, the people, think is important to me,
and I want to make sure I'm able to understand
everything you have to say!
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