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Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home

by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

When I do conflict resolution training, I often point out that despite the universal presence of conflict, we are rarely taught in any direct way how to deal with conflict. You can have two Ph.D.s and still know nothing about conflict.

In some sense, the same can be said about email. Nearly everyone in the workplace uses email. A lot! Yet in the fifteen years that email has been a mainstream part of the workplace, we seem to have figured out how to use it by trial and error. Because it was so new to everyone, that made sense in the early days. But it’s been around for more than a decade now. It seems only logical that there should be some kind of guide that lets us know the basics of how to use email as a method of communication.

Enter the book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. Shipley is the Op-Ed editor at the New York Times and Schwalbe is editor in chief at Hyperion books, and they do a great job of laying out the basics of email as a communication medium. It is probably a little overkill in its detail (separate sections about “To:”, “CC:” and even a discussion of the pros and cons of “Dear Jamie” versus “Dear Mr. Notter”). But I think it’s better to have too much detail rather than not enough.

My favorite parts are where they explore email as a strange combination of written communication and spoken communication. Of course, technically it is written communication, like a letter or a memo, but that is not typically how we write them. We write them as if we are speaking.

For example, the authors, when editing books or writing newspaper columns, would not use contractions (would not versus wouldn’t). But in email, this poses a risk, because people assume a more conversational tone. To actually add the “not” in there might imply a reprimand that is not intended.

They describe the six basic types of email messages: requesting, responding, informing, thanking, apologizing, and connecting. Each section goes into detail, with useful sample emails (many of which are quite funny) as illustrations. They also have separate chapters on the emotional email and the email that can land you in jail.

It is well written, quite funny at times, and I think it is a useful guide for everyone. No matter how much you currently use email, I would imagine this book will fill in a few gaps in your understanding of how to write emails, and it will get you thinking about when to use email and when to use other forms of communication.