Writing Effective E-Mail

You cannot determine much about a person's status by reading an email. They may make assumptions on flimsy pretexts. One of the biggest status cues is your competence with the language. If you have lots of misspellings and your grammer doesn't make sense, they may assume that you are uneducated and probably not very bright. People will also extract status cues from your domain name. You can steer people's impressions of you by adding a signature. How much time you spend on composing your email and managing status cues depends on several things (do you know your correspondent already, how much previous contact you have had with them, what outcome do you expect for your mesage, what do their emails look like). Formality is used to indicate a correspondent's inability to make a reply. Be cautious about the tone of your message. If you want people to respond, be informal and chatty. Write more formally if you want to discourage people from sending you email.

You can get away without adding extra identification if you are well-known to your correspondent. In other cases, you should provide your correspondent with enough clues to figure out who you are, why you are writing, and why they should pay attention to you. This information should appear in your opening paragraph.
Greetings are hard to do well. In the United States we can be fairly informal. You still need to be careful about making assumptions and using sensitive words.

Points to remember:
Language status in your email messages can be improved by using grammar- and spell-checkers.
Signatures and self-introductions can reduce misconceptions.
Be cautious about the tone of your message. Your tone will set the stage for how and whether other people will respond.

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