In my last column, I stressed the importance of observing business etiquette in the digital world, especially with reference to cell phone communication. We will revisit that topic a few days later. But for today, let us discuss a few dos and don’ts about emails.
Ray Tomlinson is largely recognised as the inventor of email in 1972. It is said that he chose the ‘@’ symbol to indicate messages from one computer to another. But I’m pretty certain that Tomlinson did not predict the kind of communication revolution emails would create, completely effacing snail mail, over the next few decades.
In December 2014, apparently there were 3,079,339, 857 Internet users (source: www.internetworldstats.com) and out of these, email connected close to 90 per cent of the world’s population. That’s a staggering number which has undoubtedly gone up now.
I remember creating my first email account with the tingling excitement of entering a new, virtual world, not knowing what to expect or how to behave, completely unsure of what kind of relationship I would form with my computer.
Down the years, it has become a part and parcel of everyone’s life and we have taken it for granted. The flipside is we no longer know how to write using our hands. We have forgotten what our own handwriting looks like or the elegance of a hand-written letter. But my subject today is UEAAW in the context of emails. Read on.
Some days ago, I received an email greeting that had “HO” as the subject line. The first thought that came to my mind was, “Head Office”. Then, I told myself, “Wait a minute, that can’t be it… I nearly dismissed the email as spam but the festival of Onam (Kerala’s harvest festival) had just been celebrated and the season’s cheer prevented me from deleting it. So, I opened the email only to find the following message: “Happy Onam to You and Your family!” The HO was an acronym for ‘Happy Onam’.
I am aware that there is a strong lobby for acronyms: they make our life easy; they help us convey messages without having to expand it. Valid reasons, all. We already have a zillion acronyms and every day, new ones are being created. PFA (Please find attached), PFB (Please Find Below), FYI (For Your Information), FYI & A (For Your Information and Action), EOD (End of Day), COB (Closure of Business)… The list is endless and quite common. But I have a problem with a few of email acronyms and I have three reasons for that:
Your reader may not know the expansion of the acronym you are using. It may be known to only a specialist group.
At times, the acronyms that are created seem plain silly. ‘HO’ is a case in point or a “JFYI” where the J stands for “just”.
Acronyms which are popular in one part of the world may be less known in other cultures. “PFA” is more Indian and British than American in its usage and origin, for instance.
So the next time we use an acronym, let us pause and ask ourselves if our audience really knows what it means or if it is really necessary. Otherwise, it might be plain safer to expand and write in complete sentences. After all, our goal is to communicate, not to confuse.
(Just in case you were wondering what UEAAW “Using Email Acronyms at Work”).
The author is a writer, poet and heads corporate communications at UST Global, headquartered in the U.S. Email: writer.anu@gmail.com.
