Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 15:46:37 EST From: Rob Slade Subject: Book Review: "The Elements of E-mail Style" by Angell/Heslop BKMALSTL.RVW 940526 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company P.O. Box 520 26 Prince Andrew Place Don Mills, Ontario M3C 2T8 416-447-5101 fax: 416-443-0948 73171.657@Compuserve.com tiffanym@aw.com bobd@aw.com johnw@aw.com keithw@aw.com lisaro@aw.com "The Elements of E-mail Style", Angell, 1994, 0-201-62709-4, U$12.95/C$16.95 dangell@shell.portal.com bheslop@shell.portal.com On the one hand, electronic mail is simply another form of written communications. On the other hand, email's very earliest beginnings lie only twenty years back. Ten years ago, less than a million people in the world had access to the medium, and the rapid growth in the popularity of email, while it means there are many current practitioners, also means that few users have any depth of experience. In addition, the speed and ease of electronic communications allow the unwary to get themselves into considerable trouble. There is, therefore, a need for an email style guide. That is not to say that it need be this one. Indeed, it is very difficult to say that this is an email guide, at all. It is simply a writing and style guide, and, for those in the market for such an item, it may be suitable as a quick reference. As far as email goes, however, while mention is frequent, material is scant. The content would seem to indicate that the authors, while they have some familiarity with the use of email, have very little experience with the broad range of online communications systems, and no feel for computer mediated communications as a whole. The limited exposure shows up in areas such as the coverage of, for example, flaming (the generation of abusive messages). Their suggestions, while not inappropriate, are not particularly helpful, either. Read your message twice. (From experience, this just tends to increase your determination.) Would you say this to the person's face? (Heck, yes! I'm mad!) A more practical alternative is to write it, hold it, and then re-read the original message before sending it. (And remember, if the original message isn't worth re-reading, it isn't worth a response, either.) Another indication of limited experience is the use of specific suggestions rather than general principles. Line length and font styles are mentioned in regard to terminal characteristics, but there is no discussion of common terminal characteristics or alternative forms of emphasis. We are told not to say "no" to an offer from a Japanese correspondent but with no other examples of cultural diversity, this is of little use. Chapter one is a list of the standard email do's and don'ts. The points are generally good, but the supporting text is less than useful. Chapter two *is* useful; a very cogent list of suggestions for structuring email text for greatest impact. Chapters three to seven, covering vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation, could be summed up in two words: learn English. The material specific to email from all five chapters is, in total, less than the space devoted to one list of frequently misspelled words. Chapter eight gives some recommendations on the use of formatting and special characters. Some points are good; many (such as the use of tabs for column alignment) are not. (Many systems use eight character cells for a tab character, but some use other alignments and thus, tabs can be more trouble than help.) Most of the chapter, however, is dedicated to the promotion of ASCII art and the use of special characters. The special characters are those that use the eighth bit. These are sometimes called "high ASCII" or "upper ASCII" and are, in truth, not ASCII or any other standard. Fidonet echo rules often expressly forbid the use of such characters, since they may be deleted by mail transfer agents, be incomprehensibly different on the end user's system, or, in the worst case, be system control characters. A glossary is included which would have been more useful if it had more terms from email (IMHO) than from English class. An appendix about Internet posting conventions talks only about Usenet and basically recaps suggestions made earlier. For those completely new to email and net systems, this does contain points to ponder, with some shortcomings in terms of practical advice. For the B1FFs of the world, they could certainly stand to learn English but probably won't. For those interested in a serious examination of the email field, this will be disappointing. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKMALSTL.RVW 940526. Distribution permitted in TELECOM Digest and associated newsgroups/mailing lists. DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Sept. '94) Springer-Verlag [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I rarely comment on anything in Mr. Slade's reviews, but something definitly needs correction this time. Email did NOT begin 'only twenty years back'. If Telex and TWX were not considered email, then I don't know what you would call them. Telex and TWX were both essenti- ally the same product with the former having been developed by Western Union more than half a century ago. TWX (yperiter Echange) was developed by AT&T in the 1950's when they decided to try and encroach on Western Union's territory. Both involved machines with modems which had keyboards and printers. An operator at one end typed on the keyboard and the resulting message printed out on the paper at the other end. It is true the term 'email' itself came into usage only about twenty years ago and into common usage during perhaps the past decade, but we have had the essence of email for a long time. Long before 'every business can have their own telegraph operator' as someone at WUTCO once commented during the Second World War era, every town large and small had a public telegraph office. These functioned as sort of community email places where operators sat at keyboards entering messages which came out on the printers of similar devices in distant cities. To be sure, we called them 'telegrams' rather than the modern term 'email' ... but it existed none the less. After AT&T began marketing TWX, they got sued by Western Union to force them out of the business with WUTCO claiming the voice traffic belonged to AT&T while the written traffic should be the exclusive property of WUTCO ... a court agreed and AT&T had to divest themselves of TWX. That was in the middle 1960's I guess.