First, remember the effectiveness of communication is always improved when you know your audience. Does the person you are sending to make it an hourly, daily, weekly, or inconsistent
habit of reading their email? This is important because if I know some of my recipients only look at email weekly, it would be ineffective to send them a notice of a meeting we are having
tomorrow.

How do people read email? How do you read email? I have had several people tell me they missed something in an email and later they went back and sure enough, it was there. I believe
because email is a more informal method of written communication we have a tendency to get sloppy. Writers of email oftentimes do not bother to worry about proper capitalization, grammar, spelling, etc. I suspect that casual attitude has slipped over to the minds of our readers. Quite often people skim email more than they would a letter. They may scroll down the page too quickly and miss important content.

Not all email that gets opened is read. People may open an email and plan on reading it later only to find they have a huge pile of unread email that is old or stale so they finally delete it.

If you send something by email and assume it has been read you may be in for a surprise. First, several email programs have filters that may prevent your email from ever reaching your
audience. They may not even know these filters exist. Second, if you are like many people you get a lot of junk email or spam. Many people just delete it without reading it. Sometimes while
using their cursor to highlight junk mail for deletion your message might get hit by accident. Once again gone without even being opened.

Another temptation of email is that it is so easy to delegate something by just forwarding it to someone with an email note attached. This is ineffective delegation as you do not have their commitment to get it done.

As with any written communication, email does not give you the opportunity to listen to your audience during your presentation. On the phone or in person you can ask follow up questions to clarify something you may not understand. You might sense in someone&Mac226;s voice a level of stress and ask them if they would like your help. Two-way communication typically is much more effective than one-way communication.

Feel free to reply to these comments or any other of my email reports. I always love to here from the people who allow me to do a job I love.

Yours in service,
John Drebinger
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