Don’t let these bad habits infect your emails

Communicating via email is obviously very different from speaking on a phone or meeting in person.

Email etiquette, though frequently unwritten, is important—but some people ignore these commonsense guidelines and do what they want.

Here are four email behaviors that annoy me. They may not bother you, but chances are they’re irritating to many of the people who read your emails:

1. Abbreviating words that don’t need to be abbreviated

How many emails do you get that end with “Thx”?

Really? You just didn’t have the time to type out “Thanks”? It’s not that I don’t understand what is being communicated. I get it. But it’s almost like saying, “I’m too busy and important to have the kind of time required in a day to type out the word ‘Thanks’.”

In one particular instance an abbreviation really irritated me. I don’t remember who the writer was (and I wouldn’t mention it if I did, obviously), but he was at TVGuide.com. He was going to post a story for me (which I appreciated) and I had asked him to hold it until the following day. I emailed him and asked, “Will you be able to hold onto this until tomorrow?”

His complete and total and full response was “Y.”