The etiquette of email, or why you should ease up on the caps

Jeremy Wagstaff   |  Mon, 10/12/2009 2:10 PM  |  Sci-Tech

If you don't want to get fired, make sure you don't send emails to co-workers IN CAPITALS.

That's what happened to New Zealander Vicki Walker.

And while it's a tale that sort of ends happily, in fact it raises a bunch of issues that I'm afraid haven't really been addressed amidst the cultural landslide that is the digitized office.

Vicki Walker, according to the New Zealand Herald, was sacked for sending "confrontational" emails with words in red, in bold and in capital letters.

She got her day in court, however: Walker, a financial controller with ProCare Health, was awarded NZ$17,000 for unfair dismissal, and according to the paper plans to lodge an appeal for further compensation.

The only evidence produced was an email that "advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: "To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist'."

Of course, it sounds a bit scarier in bold, and red, and blue.

My sympathies are with Ms. Walker. But they're also for her colleagues.

The thing is that a consensus has quickly emerged that rules out using too much garish colors, formatting and capitals in our emails.

CAPS ARE CONSIDERED SHOUTING. AND THEREFORE BAD MANNERS.

Colors - at least more than a few tasteful ones - in an email are regarded as childish. And rarely look good.

A few companies have tried to add fancy tricks to emails - backgrounds, flashing lights, gizmos that make an email more personal.

No one I know uses them.

The most I see are sometimes multicolored signatures - the name and address that some folk add to the bottom of their emails.

Garish, but not offensively so.

Indeed, the email of today looks remarkably similar to the email of nearly 20 years ago.

Plain text. Basic punctuation - paragraphs, commas, full stops, the usual stuff. Nothing flowery.

And that's a good thing.

Not only is subdued formatting easier on the eye, it creates a common medium of expression that transcends culture and even language.

We can more easily relate to someone who sends emails than we can to them writing a letter.

A letter in another language looks wholly exotic because it probably is in a handwriting that is culturally different too.

But an email is an email: plain text, mostly. That gives us all some common ground.

Talking of which, how about the email without any capital letters at all? not even at the beginning of sentences?

Some folk don't like this.

They think it's lazy. Or just bad grammar.

I tend to think it's a sign of intimacy.

If someone knows me well enough, or thinks they do, to lower case me, then I'm happy.

(Logically, if CAPS IS SHOUTING then writing in lower case should be considered whispering. But that doesn't seem to have caught on.)

Text messaging has only added to this trend. And taken it a stage further, with abbreviated words: l8r for later, etc. (I had to look that one up. I'm not great on these things.)

This is actually just a phase. When everybody learns to use predictive text, and when sending one SMS message won't cost any less than sending three, then people will stop doing this.

(I love the art of the SMS message, of being able to cram a thought into 160 characters, but in my view the effect is ruined when one abbreviates. It's like leaving out vowels in a haiku to make it fit.)

So, Ms. Walker gets her money, and her colleagues get some relief from the CAPS.

I suspect that if an office worker is jazzing up their emails to that extent, there are probably other office issues that need to be addressed.

But, just to be sure, you might want to make sure that the formatting of your emails is not causing distress to their recipients.

Save the shouting for the office bowling competition and the flowery fonts for Valentine's Day.

But feel free to lower case me anytime.

(c) 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd

This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com

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