Graceful communications in a less-than-graceful age

If you peruse some of the letters young Civil War soldiers sent to their sweethearts, you are struck by how graceful, albeit a bit flowery, their writing is. Few had attended college, many completing only an 8th grade education, yet they wrote with better grammar and greater lyricism than most college graduates today.

To add to this, the geographic and historical distances these 19th century missives had to travel made letters the one (and infrequent) opportunity people had to express their hearts and record their lives, and therefore all-important.

How can we restore some grace to our writing today?

1. Remember that the English language is not a matter of bits and bytes

According to The Radicati Group, business users sent and received on average 121 emails a day in 2014. It is hard to be lyrical with this much correspondence! Too often we take shortcuts in our language by overusing acronyms, catch-all phrases and business speak. These shortcuts serve to deny us our uniqueness, and they make our communications feel impersonal.

2. Grammar - it shouldn't matter but it do!

Have we let our teenagers convince us that grammar doesn't matter?  Argue as he may, the son who starts a sentence with "Me and Jordan..." is setting himself up for judgment - maybe not now, but sooner or later.

Rules of grammar may not rank up there in importance with national security, but they are still rules, and society says they matter. A good education is still highly valued so poor grammar can be perceived as a lack of education.

3. Save and review before clicking

We spend a lot of our day setting our fingers into a brief flurry of motion and then -- CLICK! The message has been sent. Yet every one of us has learned the hard way that emails can be dangerous tools. They are easily misunderstood and they never die.

Consider a habit of writing, then carefully reviewing, emails before sending. Examine tone, possible audience and even have a colleague read it before it makes its merry way down the cyberbrick road.

4. Make privacy your first assumption

There is an appalling lack of etiquette about sending emails on to others. Too often, information ends up in the inbox of others it was not intended to reach. What is in the email may appear neutral, but the forwarding recipient often doesn't check the whole email chain for material that might be confidential. A good rule of thumb is to routinely assume that an email you receive is just for you, and request permission before sending it on.

Additionally, when sending an email to a large group of people, it is imperative that you are absolutely certain the recipients are blind-copied. Nothing will turn a customer or potential client off more than seeing their email exposed to dozens of other recipients.

Can we restore just a little of the elegance of bygone days to our email communications of today? The time you take to write original, intentional emails and paying attention to their delivery may go a long way toward nurturing relationships. It may also prevent a costly misunderstanding!