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• What to consider before you SEND
• Shoot the Puppy
• Well-behaved Women Rarely Make History
• Our Diverse Clients Keep Things Interesting
• Wondering how you can use our services?
• Excuses, excuses
• Quiz
• Plain Language Dance
• You Asked

What to consider before you SEND

We recently read a terrific book on email called SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. Here are a few pointers you might find helpful for writing emails with different purposes.

Requesting
Make sure your tone is appropriate for your reader. Consider your relationship: are you asking for something from a friend, your boss or your direct report? Every relationship will require a different tone. Always be polite and follow up gently.

It’s best to ask for one thing, or several things related to that one thing. Keep your focus clear. If you are requesting several unrelated things, write separate emails.

Make sure your request stands out. Put it up front—don’t bury it at the end of your message.

Responding
Put your response up front, even if it’s bad news. If you are embedding several responses, use a different colour. If the email will be printed and filed, the colour won’t show up, so use a different font.

If you need time to respond, let the reader know. Use an out-of-office autoresponder if you are away for a day or more.

Informing
Email is ideal for sharing information. To let your reader know it’s just information and there’s no need to act, use an FYI in the subject line.

Thanking
It’s polite to thank someone who does something for you, and it’s nice to be thanked. However, beware of never-ending thank you/you’re welcome chains. Make sure your reader wants to be thanked. Some don’t! If you don’t want your inbox cluttered up with thank you’s, use NRN (no response necessary) in your subject line.

Apologizing
If you’re apologizing for a big blunder, maybe email isn’t the best medium. Pick up the phone, or pay a visit instead.

Connecting
This is one thing email excels at. The best emails have a friendly tone and use the beginnings and endings to make a personal connection.

In this charming book, Tony Thorne presents linguistic curiosities—buzzwords, jargon and slang—for their formal inventiveness and wit, and for the new attitudes and concepts they embody. Here are some of our favourite entries:

Adhocracy: improvised decision making

Al desko: eating at your workstation

Caving: leading a reclusive existence at home

Dashboard dining: eating while inside a car

Decruitment: laying off employees

Deskfast: breakfast eaten at your workstation

Jitterati: those rendered nervous or insecure by involvement with electronic communications

Open kimono philosophy: a policy of transparency

Puckered-ups: sycophants

Worklessness: unemployment, redundancy

Shoot the puppy: to do the unthinkable, take extreme action and/or terminate an unacceptable situation

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Colette (1873 – 1954) was a gifted and prolific French author who, er, made history. She’s best known in North America for having written Gigi, which was made into a movie starring Maurice Chevalier and Leslie Caron. Here are some of her bons mots:

Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.

Give me a dozen such heartbreaks, if that would help me lose a couple of pounds.

I love my past. I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.

Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.

The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.

What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

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People often ask us how we stay enthusiastic about teaching writing skills. We find it easy because we love our topic and because of the diversity of our clients. To give you a sense of how varied our work can be, here are snapshots of a few of our current and recent clients:

Regional Municipality of York
Can you imagine reading more than 40 reports every month? That’s what York Region Councilors need to do. To make these reports more readable, we worked with the CAO’s office to customize a Report Writing course. We started with an executive session for the Commissioners and the CAO. Then we rolled out two-day courses for all senior managers—300 people! We hear that the Councilors appreciate the talking headers, which allow them to read the reports more quickly. Improving their productivity allows them more time to do their jobs, look after their constituents and concentrate on the local projects that really matter to them in their communities.

Desjardins Financial Security
We worked with about 140 people in the rapidly growing Group Insurance division to develop a proprietary Email Protocol. Facilitating small groups over several sessions, we incorporated everyone’s ideas for using email courteously and efficiently. Now everyone in Group Insurance (Toronto) shares email conventions and expectations. The best part is that every person has a sense of ownership, knowing their ideas are reflected in the final document.

The Redpath Group
We’ve been providing a series of Effective Business Writing courses for The Redpath Group at its Canadian head office in North Bay, Ontario. The Redpath Group is a major mining contracting firm that develops underground mines throughout the world. From the frigid cold of Nunavut to the tropical heat of Indonesia, Redpath has developed some of the largest precious and base metal mines in operation. New technology makes mining deep mineral deposits viable and it is not unusual for Redpath crews to work more than 2 kilometres below surface. Few people are aware that mining is one of the safest industries to work in. Because of the unpredictability of working with natural elements, the industry has developed high standards of processes and procedures to insure the safety of the people working in that environment.

Ivanhoe Cambridge
We’re pleased to add another progressive real estate company to our client list. We already provide Effective Business Writing courses to the Minto Group Inc., both in Toronto and Ottawa, and Email Writing for Results to Delsuites and Del Condominium Rentals. Our newest real estate client, Ivanhoe Cambridge, is also pretty interesting: this Canadian-based global company owns, manages, develops, and invests in high-quality regional and super-regional shopping centres all over the world, including Canada, Brazil and Europe. For Ivanhoe Cambridge, we provide Email Writing for Results, Grammar and Proofreading and Writing Basics in locations across Canada.

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Wondering how you can use our services?

Courses

Effective Business Writing: This two-day course is ideal for anyone who needs to write letters, short reports or emails that are clear, concise and persuasive.

Writing Basics: This is a one-day version of Effective Business Writing.

Rédactions d’affaires efficaces: Our French Effective Business Writing course is perfect for your Quebec offices.

Report and Proposal Writing: This two-day course is for people who need to write long, complex documents. It’s perfect for anyone who writes reports of any sort, proposals, business cases, or briefing notes, and it makes a great follow-up to Effective Business Writing.

Email Writing for Results™: This popular half-day course gives participants practical strategies for writing email effectively. It’s perfect for anyone who communicates electronically to internal or external clients.

Email Management: This half-day course teaches more than just email writing. Participants also learn how to manage the volume in their inboxes and be more courteous senders.

Grammar and Proofreading: This lively one-day course provides a review of grammar and punctuation rules. Participants practise repairing sentences and proofreading longer documents. It’s ideal for anyone who wants greater confidence with grammar.

Technical Writing and Documentation: This two-day course will help anyone who documents procedures, writes specifications and requirements, or generates online reference material.

Self-study Effective Business Writing: This self-study Effective Business Writing program is perfect if instructor-led training is inconvenient for your learners.

Services

Plain Language Editing: Let us help you rewrite your important documents in a clear, engaging style.

One-on-one Coaching: Coaching is effective because we work with your own writing, teaching you only the skills you need to learn.

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With cold and flu season upon us, here are some blunders to avoid when you write notes explaining your children’s absence from school:

Please excuse Mary for being absent. She was sick and I had her shot.

Please excuse Tom for being absent yesterday. He had diarrhea and his boots leak.

Please excuse Jimmy for being. It was his father’s fault.

Please excuse Harriet for missing school yesterday. We forgot to get the Sunday paper off the porch, and when we found it Monday, we thought it was Sunday.

My son is under the doctor’s care and should not take P.E. today. Please execute him.

Please excuse Roland from P.E. for a few days. Yesterday he fell out of a tree and misplaced his hips.

Maryann was absent December 11 – 16 because she had a fever, sore throat, headache, and upset stomach. Her sister was also sick, fever and sore throat. Her brother had a low grade fever and ached all over. I wasn’t the best either, sore throat and fever. There must be the flu going around school, her father even got hot last night.

Please excuse my son’s tardiness. I forgot to wake him up and I did not find him till I started making the beds.

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We love words, especially ones that don’t belong in business documents. See if you can match these words with their definitions.

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When invited to perform at the Plain Language Association International’s (PLAIN) 2007 conference in Amsterdam, Jody Bruner jumped at the opportunity to combine her passions for contemporary dance and plain language. For more information, pictures and a short video clip, visit www.plainlanguagedance.com.

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You Asked Us

Question: I’m confused about when to use ‘I’ and when to use ‘me.’ Could you please clarify this rule?

Answer: We notice that many people mix these words up in speech—and in writing. Just as ungrammatical speaking erodes your credibility, so does ungrammatical writing.

The personal pronoun ‘I’ is used as a subject of a sentence, phrase or subordinate clause:

I attended the show. (subject)

That car belongs to me. (object)

Problems usually arise when personal pronouns are combined with compound word groups. It’s common to hear people say something like

Lorraine went with my family and I to the cottage this weekend.

To test for correctness, strip away all the compound words (in the sentence above ‘my family and’) to see which pronoun is correct. Clearly, it should read

Lorraine went with (my family and) me to the cottage.

Often, business writers use the reflexive pronoun ‘myself,’ in places where the objective case pronoun (me) is required.

Please contact Eddie or myself for more information.

When you remove the compound words ‘Eddie or,’ it’s clear the sentence should read

Please contact (Eddie or) me for more information.

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Answers

1. k; 2. g; 3. n; 4. h; 5. d; 6. a; 7. b; 8. c; 9. e; 10. l; 11. f;
12. i; 13. m; 14. j; 15. p; 16. o.

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