Читать книгу Digital Etiquette For Dummies - Eric Butow - Страница 29

Online communication is primarily a written medium, and though you may meet using Zoom or another online video app from time to time, you don’t want to do that all the time. In a corporate environment, you’ll likely chat with each other via text in a collaboration app like Slack or, for better or worse, email messages.

With email, you have the benefit of not having anyone else read your message until you’re ready to send it. (We won’t visit the horror of accidentally pressing the Reply All icon.) The bad news is that many people — and you may be one of them — believe that they’re better writers than they are. So they think they can just bang out a message and send it.

You don’t have the benefit of having an editor with you, the way we do with this book, but you do have the ability to take a break, focus on another task for a little while, and then reread your message. We think (heck, we know) that you’ll be shocked by what you find as you proofread.

Don’t be surprised if you delete a lot of unnecessary words and maybe replace some of them with new ones that sound better. And you may be surprised to find that you may not want to send the message, after all — you may want instead to think about what you really want to say and then write a different version later. You’re allowed to do that, you know.

Well, what about writing in a live chat or texting? Here’s our simple advice: Keep everything short and sweet, but not so short that people may have trouble understanding you — that is, don’t write acronyms and abbreviations in place of every other word!