i somehow manage to keep my friends
Open Loops: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With Email
i do three of these things regularly.
1. i ramble like nobody’s business. my email stories have tangents and ridiculously long parentheticals to include everything. but at least it’s all tangentially related. and it’s not like it’s work email. work email is to the point. personal email is more of me having a conversation with friends i can’t actually speak with. and in the normal flow of conversation with many of my friends, we break into the tangent quite frequently.
2. the no caps, i do it. i’m doing it now. i do try to observe at least partially correct grammar and ounctuation. actually for the longest time i’ve been trying to get out of the no caps habit, it’s just something you have to do or not. in fact, i think i have a post on it from way back when i first started this blog considering whether i’d type properly with caps and all the goodness that comes with it, or just maintain my current non-caps typing. i guess it’s blatantly obvious which won out, but i still consider typing properly.
3. i DEFINITELY (and i don’t use bold or italics, though i can, to emphasize something, since i’m no caps i just all caps, damnit, another tangent) use the off-beat humor/sarcasm in the email. and blog post for that matter. but i don’t send it to anyone who wouldn’t get it. and i know that’s what everyone thinks, but again, business/work versus personal email is different for me. just like i can talk ghetto or whatever with the best of them, but can talk properly when called upon to do so. but i have nothing if not sarcastic friends, so they get it.
beyond that, i really do try to maintain good email etiquette
