Dave Barry reviews David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home in The New York Times. It’s a fairly lighthearted review about a somewhat serious (at least for business) matter. Most of the advice that the book gives comes down to what intelligent people would consider “common sense” or rules similar to other forms of communication. Barry writes:

E-mail, for all its efficiency, often fails to achieve its intended result; a vague or carelessly worded message can cause major problems — personal, legal and financial — for senders and receivers. Helping you avoid these problems is the goal of “Send,” an informative, entertaining, thorough and thoughtful book. The authors are media veterans — David Shipley is deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times; Will Schwalbe is editor in chief of Hyperion Books — with extensive, and not always positive, experience sending and receiving e-mail. They summarize their essential message in two rules: “Think before you send” and “Send e-mail you would like to receive.”

I was pleased to find that my own email habits seem to conform somewhat naturally to the guidelines that they recommend. I probably err on the side of writing too much, or sending emails that are lengthier than they should be according to Send. My excuse is that I am trying to compensate for what Shipley and Schwalbe correctly note is one of email’s most profound limitations: the inability to accurately convey emotion or tone.

My other failing as an emailer, according to the book, has to do with my closings. I generally just use a dash and then my first name, adopting a style similar to signing a note. Sometimes I will close with “Love” on a personal email and sometimes I resort to “Sincerely” if the email is a more formal request and I don’t know the recipient. Shipley and Schwalbe recommend that the standard closing should be “Yours Ever.” I haven’t read Send to know their explanation for this, but I am intrigued because this was the closing that I’ve read in numerous instances of British Government correspondence that I’ve read while doing research. The British tradition seems alive and well, even in something as mundane as office emails.

The complete review in The New York Times review: Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home