Email Etiquette and its Potential Impact on Career Development

Email Etiquette and its Potential Impact on Career Development

Introduction

I intend to examine the use of language in email through the lens of those advice manuals it has a positive impact on the career development in several ways as it may enhance the writing communication etiquettes (Olmsted 2006). First, I will look at the roots these guidebooks have in history, from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Early Modern period. Then, I will look at where they fit in the current evolution of the English language. Finally, I will make a case for a descriptive analysis of these books as an imperfect but defensible way to examine the evolution of a new type of language (McLuhan 2003).

Discussion

One could argue that the English language is evolving as rapidly now as it was during the Renaissance, before Samuel Johnson's landmark dictionary, when William Shakespeare made up a word if it did not already exist and spelled his own name several different ways. Not only have new words been added to the English language because of the new technology, new roots for words have sprung up. As I have talked to friends and neighbors about my research, I inevitably hear a comment about how email is eroding English, and they give examples of grammar and spelling errors in their digital correspondence. Inevitably, the speaker is a supervisor over the age of 40 in an office setting, complaining about emails received from younger subordinates. It is hard to tell whether the complaints are a function of poor education on the part of subordinates (Sant 2008).

Prescriptive Tradition

The advice manuals can find their forerunners in the prescriptive language texts that generations of Americans studied in school. The rules set out in these texts, as difficult and arbitrary as they may seem, have served a role of standardizing and formalizing language. This role has existed at least as far back as the rules of rhetoric of the ancient Greeks and Romans and has changed with the technologies used to transmit language (Leitch 2001). Prescriptive language texts that many adults studied in school teach as a matter of right and wrong. But language in the real world does not exist in such a stark dichotomy, and it never has. There are levels of formality in language that are appropriate in some cases and not in others.

Ultimately, good use of the language is not a matter of right or wrong, but of clarity, honor, and power, as Longinus underscores in On Sublimity. He writes, Choice of correct and magnificent words is a source of immense power to entice and charm the hearer (Leitch 2001). The ancients saw great power in use of language and defined best practices for their students to make them the most effective speakers possible. It was a matter of good, better, and best, not right or wrong. The email guides follow in this tradition by offering instruction in how to write the most ...