Guest Post: Professional Emailing Etiquette that is Too Often Abused

Hope you're having a great MLK Day today! We love our guest posts here at Astron Solutions: Welcome to the World of HR blog. Today we have a great one from Kimberly Wilson on e-mail etiquette. Kimberly is from accredited online colleges, she writes on topics including career, education, student life, college life, home improvement, time management etc. Here is her guest post:
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So much of our conversation today takes place through informal modes of text. With things like text messaging, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, and emailing, we've become very comfortable with fast paced and impersonal conversation. While these modes of communication were at one time reserved solely for personal or informal discussions, conversations in a professional context have become more and more common through these impersonal text avenues. While this has made many professional conversations easier to get through, it has also stirred up several agreed upon technical rules and guidelines for professional emailing that go (annoyingly) ignored. These four professional emailing etiquette rules can be easy to overlook, but are (no doubt) some of the biggest pet peeves of your boss and coworkers.

Replying 101
This is the No. 1 emailing thing you will hear people in the office complaining about. Pay close attention to how and to whom you are replying when you send an email. Never reply all. This is basically a good guideline to go by always. Obviously, if you are the boss or supervisor, sometimes reply all is a necessary step, but for the most part employees shouldn't need to reply all. Email chains that end up circling the office are distracting and obnoxious for recipients who are not actually concerned with the content. Reply to the people you need to see your email. The reply all plague often happens when people are simply careless and not paying attention. A good way to avoid this is by only putting the people you want to reply in the to line and then CC everyone else that needs to see the text.

Subject Lines
Subject lines are one of the most important aspects of your email in both a personal and professional atmosphere. The subject line of an email helps your recipients understand what the email concerns and how urgent it is. Put a subject that is brief and to the point, but that is telling of the email's content. You should give your recipient the bottom line of the message when they read the subject line. If the email is urgent (and only if it is truly urgent), put the word urgent in the subject. You should be precise and detailed in your subject line without being longwinded. Do not leave the subject line blank. Recipients use the subject line to determine how (or if) they will read the message.

Length
The length of an email can be a tricky thing to tackle. Emails in a professional context should be brief and concise. You want to make it as easy as possible for the recipient to get the necessary details, so they can respond accordingly. However, as with any text, we often find ourselves rambling on or giving unnecessary details. Keep things brief. Give only the details and information the recipient needs. Try to break things up to make the text easy to read and follow. Many people will read the first part of an email and then trail off or lose focus when the email is long. If you have a lot of things to address in one email, use formatting to make things more clear. Try bullets or separated paragraphs. On the other side of the equation, if you are responding to a long email with several points you need to address, try replying within the message. Use a different font or color and respond to each point within their message, so that your recipient can follow the entire dialogue carefully.