Book Review: Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home Directs Individuals About Email Etiquette

E-mail etiquette, particularly for the office, is a perpetually hot topic these days and is subject to any number of articles, blogs, and news reports. Add to the dialogue the recent book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe (Knopf Publishers, $19.95) and the accompanying Website www.thinkbeforeyousend.com for an e-mail etiquette analysis.

More than just an assessment of what can (and will) go wrong, Shipley and Schwalbe offer insights into how not to commit egregious acts of email with a lot of wit and humor along the way. For readers who want more than an instruction manual, Send examines how and why so many lapses of social intelligence occur via e-mail because the sender does not take the extra time to stop and think about how the message may be taken by the reader. Send offers practical tips for appropriate writing style and avoiding other potential gaffes, which can be summarized with one statement: think before you send.

Think before you send makes perfect sense, but because of how easy e-mail is, many people don't, and leave a "paper" trail of poorly-thought-out decisions behind them. Enter www.thinkbeforeyousend.com, Shipley and Schwalbe's Web site for "Anyone who has ever used email." The Web site looks like an old school In Box with typewriter-esque fonts and plain text. Click on the links and you won't find anything fancy, but plenty of entertaining evidence about how e-mails can go wrong.

This is the Senate. This is the Senate on email. Any questions?

One of the best examples of how e-mail correspondence can go wrong is under the Blog section that describes what happens when senders misuse the "cc" function instead of "bcc." Sen. Sam Brownback's presidential campaign learned about this particular gaffe earlier this summer when an intern responded to a list of individuals about the Senator's position on the immigration bill via the "cc" function. Massive emails that share everyone's email address may not be the correct choice.

Bad emails (aka Hall of Shame).

Submissions about what bothers people abound in this section. One of the classics is the "wrong recipient" error detailed in "I got fired via email ON ACCIDENT." Looking past the all caps in the subject line and grammatical error (two pet peeves of email etiquette), the mistake of hitting reply instead of forward problem reveals why if you aren't paying attention you can have a big problem.

Email Tips show how email is evidence.

Tip #44: Asking questions (on email) can come back to haunt you. If it's in writing and appears in court, you have shown that you know there was a problem. Along this line of thought, "One thing we've learned is that the 'e' in email might as well stand for evidence," Norman Pearlstine said to NPR's Diane Rehm about his decision as editor-in-chief of Time, Inc. to turn over Matt Cooper's notes on confidential sources in the Valerie Plame identity-leak investigation. E-mail is a definitively insecure mode of sharing information.

Whether your e-mail pet peeve is poor grammar, misspellings, blank subject lines, or overly enthusiastic use of capital letters and exclamation marks, Shipley and Schwalbe will address it with humor and instruction. People say stupid things via email in the workplace, don't be one of them.