Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

E-Mail "Noncommercial, nonfat, and gluten-free"

For the email-charter, The Subversive Copy Editor (CSE) says: it's "noncommercial, nonfat and gluten-free."

I agree. After all, I have her book and follow her blog because what she says helps me greatly. And I do love E-Mail compared to what I used to struggle with--that is: snail mail--between the time I learned to write and the invention of the e-mail. But e-mail has a tendency to overflow and waste precious time, thanks to our commercialism and our lack of concise expression.

Can we do something about the hundreds of e-mails we each get every single day and try to answer or eliminate them? Maybe. At least two people came up with some rules as The E-Mail Charter.

I read about the charter in SCE's latest blog entry, titled An E-Mail Diet: EOM NNTR
http://www.subversivecopyeditor.com/blog/2011/07/an-e-mail-diet-eom-nntr.html

And the email charter can be reached at:
http://emailcharter.org/index.html

According to SCE, the eighth rule is the best, and I can see why, since it is the most doable.

The eighth rules offers two short-cut alternatives in the form of acronyms:

EOM: Short for end of message to be put on the subject line if the message can be expressed on the subject line alone. For example, for us WdC members: Thank you for the gps. EOM.

NNTR: Short for No Need to Respond. This can be used inside, at the end of the message or on the subject line.

Can we stick to the Charter's Rules, or being human, are we going to mess this one up, too? Just look at what we did with our government in two and a half centuries. On the other hand, acronyms may lean more toward success than amendments.

In either case, it helps to be an optimist. If you're an optimist, you won't be able to avoid the bumpy roller-coaster ride, and at the end, you'll still throw up, but you'll think, At least, I went on the ride.