Are poorly crafted e-mails your company's Achilles' heel?

by Jeff Davis | Jan 07, 2000 8:00:00 AM

Tags: Jeff Davis

Takeaway: When you and your employees write e-mail notes, does your correspondence reflect the degree of professionalism your company deserves?

When I wrote an article calling for IT people to pay attention to spelling and grammar in e-mail notes, I had no idea that the overwhelmingly positive response by the support community would be so swift and furious. (Read the article here .) If using proper English in e-mail is important to support professionals, should it matter to IT managers? Of course it should.

TechRepublic reader TPMagill agreed. “This is one of my personal pet peeves. Some of the worst messages I receive are from vice presidents. Theoretically they should be some of the best-educated people on staff, right? Not if you judge them by their e-mail! No caps and little, if any, punctuation.”

There’s only one right way
Language skills should matter to IT managers for two reasons. First, everything you write is scrutinized by coworkers. Few things ruin your credibility as much as sending an e-mail note that contains spelling and grammatical errors.

Second, I’m sure that you write a lot of e-mail messages to business partners and customers. You need to create and maintain an image that is as professional and polished as possible. Since no one writes a perfect first draft every time, maybe your organization could benefit from a policy on e-mail spelling and grammar.
Have you implemented such a policy to remind your employees to re-read their e-mail notes before they click Send? Are you setting a good example by double-checking your own e-mail correspondence? We want to know what you think about this issue. Please post a comment below or send us a note .