Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, Revised Edition [Hardcover]

David Shipley (Author), Will Schwalbe (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 2, 2008

Send—the classic guide to email for office and home and an instant success upon its original publication—has become indispensable for readers navigating the impersonal, and often overwhelming, world of electronic communication.  Filled with real-life email success (and horror) stories and a wealth of entertaining examples, Send reveals the hidden minefields and pitfalls of email. It provides clear rules for handling all of today’s thorniest email issues, from salutations and subject lines to bcc’s and emoticons. It explains when you absolutely shouldn’t send an email and what to do when you’ve sent (in anger or in error) a potentially career-ending electronic bombshell. And it offers invaluable strategies to help you both better manage the ever-increasing number of emails you receive and improve the ones you send.

In this revised edition, David Shipley and Will Schwalbe have added fresh tales from the digital realm and a new afterword—“How to Keep Email from Taking Over Your Life,” which includes sage advice on handheld etiquette. Send is now more essential than ever, a wise and witty book that every businessperson and professional should read and read again.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An April 2007 Significant 7 Editors' Pick: Funny, engaging, and oh-so-practical, Send is the ultimate etiquette handbook for email, making David Shipley and Will Schwalbe the "Miss Manners" resource for the digital age. Full of practical insights, Send is an invaluable resource for anyone who uses email, and is guaranteed to help you "think before you click." We are not the only fans of this important book. We asked psychologist, science journalist, and bestselling author Daniel Goleman to read Send and give us his take. Check out his exclusive guest review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses, and is the author of many bestselling books, including Emotional Intelligence and most recently, Social Intelligence.

Poor Michael Brown. During the darkest days of the Hurricane Katrina debacle, Brown, then director of FEMA, the agency that so badly bungled the rescue efforts, sent this email: "Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?"

Emails can come back to haunt us--any of us. Few among us have mastered this medium, and only slowly are we realizing its dangers.

From the earliest days of email people "flamed", sending off irritating or otherwise annoying messages. One explanation for the failure to inhibit our more unruly impulses online is a mismatch between the screen we stare at as we email, and the cues the social circuits of the brain use to navigate us through an interaction effectively: on email there is no tone of voice, no facial expression. When we talk to someone on the phone or face-to-face these circuits would ordinarily squelch impulses that will seem "off." Lacking these crucial cues, flaming occurs.

It's not just flaming--I've sent my fair share of emails that were, in retrospect, embarrassing, too familiar or formal, or otherwise wrong in tone. Email invites these lapses in social intelligence in part because the social brain flies blind. In the absence of the other person's real-time emotional signals we need to take a moment to shift from focusing on our own feelings and thoughts, and intentionally focus on the other person, even in absentia, and consider, How might this message come across?

The peril of being off-key is amplified by the temptation to hit SEND prematurely: before we've thought it over and had a chance to ease up on that too-stiff tone, drop that bit of sarcasm, and remember to ask about the kids.

In the old days of letter writing--a dying art--we had plenty of time to rewrite before sealing the envelope, and so flaming letters were far more rare than red-hot emails. And so the brave new world of email could benefit from a civilizing force, a voice that articulates the ground rules online.

Enter Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, a new book by David Shipley (an old friend of mine) and Will Schwalbe. Send not only articulates the way to win--or keep--friends online, but offers practical tips on both email etiquette and on the writing style most suitable.

In this witty and wise book Shipley and Schwalbe give essential guidance on vital matters like the politics of using Cc (nobody likes to be left out); when to just reply and when to "Reply All"; the danger of the URGENT subject (too many and you cry wolf); fine-tuning your greetings to fit the relationship (if you use the wrong one, you can lose them at hello); how best to apologize online (put the word 'sorry' in the subject or else the email may never be read).

But Send is far more than Miss Manners for the Web; it's brimming with fascinating insights. For example, now that email has become the way we talk, showing up in person has added impact as the ultimate compliment, signifying that the person, meeting or project has special importance for you.

Years ago a slim volume by Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, laid out the ground rules for good writing; the book became a bible for authors, widely known just as "Strunk and White." Send should make Shipley and Schwalbe the "Strunk and White" for the Web. --Daniel Goleman (www.danielgoleman.info)

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--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Despite a subtitle indicating both workplace and domestic e-mail solutions, veteran editors Shipley and Schwalbe get right down to business in the audio edition of their book, shining a bright light on the pitfalls of cyberspace that sabotage careers. Given the brevity of their recording, such focus is practical. Shipley and Schwalbe present their material in an easy conversational style, invoking just enough self-deprecating humor to keep listeners relaxed and grounded without getting off track. They cover a myriad of large and small electronic sins: improper uses of the CC and BCC fields; lack of decorum and deference appropriate to professional relationships; delicate revelations that should only be tackled in a face-to-face encounter; and potentially threatening or offensive language. This is a well-organized defensive driving course for beginners-or recent offenders-traveling the information superhighway in a contemporary office setting. This audiobook belongs on the shelves of resources at college job-placement offices and in corporate training or professional development departments. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 26).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; Revised edition (September 2, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307270602
• ISBN-13: 978-0307270603
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1 x 7.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #405,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A Modest Success June 8, 2007

By Linda Stephenson

Format:Hardcover

Shipley and Schwalbe focus on tone. They remind us that communication in person, and to a lesser degree on the telephone, carries with it far more information than words on a screen. Tedious volumes have been written on nuance conveyed by the angle of the speaker's eyebrows, and most people seem to have picked up the concept somewhere. To counteract email's lack of tone, though, Shipley recommends inserting emoticons, those annoying little graphics meant to suggest smiley faces or winks.

Perhaps more helpful are the suggestions to stop, read, and think before hitting the "Send" command: Check your spelling, punctuation and word choice - is your meaning clear? Cut the fluff. Consider your position in relation to the recipient. Avoid frivolous requests or demands. Understand that everything you write can be permanently saved, searched, and sent to others. Learn how to clean up your hard drive, but understand that corporate backups retain copies of every document and porno pic you've ever sent or received -- except for that one essential document you need.

S & S give much attention to the "To," "Cc" and "Bcc" lines. Here's a helpful suggestion: "Never forward anything without permission, and assume everything you write will be forwarded." When responding to an email addressed and/or copied to a group, should you "Reply" or "Reply all"? The social and political ramifications of such questions get quite a few pages.

The emotional content of email gets some ink too. Flame wars are discussed, as well as the wisdom of using email to fire employees or initiate divorce proceedings. The authors argue convincingly that some messages are best delivered in person, despite the personal risk.

They touch less convincingly on security: An "independent" business leader, subpoened to offer Congressional testimony, was discovered through Word tracking in a document file to have permitted a Bush official to edit his statement. When confronted with the truth, he said, "The real scandal here is that after 15 years of using Microsoft Word, I don't know how to turn off 'Track Changes.' " Scandalous indeed. Unfortunately, S & S go on to instruct their reader on how to turn off tracking and they get it wrong.

The book does discuss some interesting issues. Trouble is, the issues have been endlessly discussed, published, flamed and forwarded online for the past 20 years. Most corporations publish their own email guidelines, often reflecting their distinct corporate culture. I've been using email since it was first available to civilians-1980 I think it was -and for as many years have shared in the online debate. My teenaged daughter, when I asked her about email, said, "I don't know much of a world without email." I reminded her that, as a Waldorf student, she had in fact been protected from the evil influence of computers almost until high school.

She came back with a story published in Reed College's student newspaper, "The Quest": A San Francisco high school, trying to take the edge off college rejections, offered prizes to students with the most rejection letters and the worst letter. Harvard was honored with "most obsequious," Cornell with "most emphatic," but it was an email from Reed College that took "worst overall." The winner had emailed Reed's admissions office to check that all his documentation had been received. In response he got a misdirected interoffice memo that said, "He's a Deny."

So there's no doubt that Shipley and Schwalbe's recommendations remain valuable. As a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and a book that received critical attention from heavy-hitters like Dave Barry, "Send" will find its way to many hands. I bristle at the suggestion that it equals the stature and grace of Strunk and White's "Elements of Style," which will occupy space on my bookshelf till my demise and beyond. But "Send" promises to reach an audience that doesn't know Usenet from fishnet. And that's a good thing.

41 of 49 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Quick Review of Send May 1, 2007

By J. A. Atkinson

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Here's a book that has been climbing up the bestseller charts the past week or so--Send: the Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwable.

Guy Kawasaki called the book "the Elements of Style" of email. I don't believe I'd go that far. It isn't exactly a reference you can pick up again and again. There is some how-to, but don't expect to learn how to manage your email or how to use an email program. Once you read the book through, you are done. I am impressed with their blurbage on the book--Bill Bryson says, "This is just the book I've been waiting for."

There is some good information here about when to send email (and when to phone), how to write an email, the pitfalls of emotion in email, and how to avoid legal trouble. But as an experienced email user, I didn't learn anything new in the book--except that maybe I'm guilty of being a little casual in my communications. Hey! Hey! Hey! That's who I am. :-) :-) :-) :-P

39 of 49 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home April 12, 2007

By R. Russell Bittner

Format:Hardcover

"Send" is smart, timely, entertaining, a good investment -- and, as a reference book, a keeper. It combines the pithy good sense of Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" with the tongue-in-cheek humor of H. W. Fowler's "Modern English Usage" to produce the equivalent of Amy Vanderbilt's "Etiquette" for the e-set.

While most of us take emailing for granted (and, unfortunately, never -- or only rarely -- think about how our message might be received at the other end), David Shipley and Will Schwalbe take us behind the electronic curtain to show us that digital yellow-brick roads might well conceal oodles of anti-personnel devices, most of them of our own unconscious design.

"All ye who enter here..." might do well to stand at the portal to the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, there's no such warning. And so, all of us -- too glibly, too happily, too unreflectively -- bound through without first taking the time to learn some basic do's and don't's.

Shipley and Schwalbe have compiled such a list -- and have provided anecdotes and illustrations aplenty to make digesting that list an eminently enjoyable undertaking. If, for example, you should ever experience "a sudden chill in the ether," you need only turn to page 131 to discover a possible source of the temperature drop between you and your pretended e-pal(s).

While "Five Words That Almost Everyone Misuses" (p. 121) certainly wasn't necessary to any reader who's spent a pleasantly sardonic afternoon with Mr. or Mrs. Malaprop, "This Is Annoying How" is the kind of literary circus act that leaves us gasping with delight.

If you're one of those readers who enjoyed Lynn Truss's "Eats(,) Shoots & Leaves" -- not only for its usefulness, but also for its moxy -- "Send" is your kind of book. If you're NOT that kind of reader, buy it anyway -- it may save (you) a friend.