touque.ca > Education Commons > Professional Development > FirstClass > E-mail

E-mail

Caution Every e-mail and instant-messaging message sent from or to your TEL account belongs to TDSB. The board has the right, without prior notice, to read any and all messages in your account. Teachers, students, and staff are advised to conduct themselves accordingly.

For more information, you are encouraged to read the TEL Mission Statement and Guidelines.

Introduction

Professional e-mail, like any other professional written communication, is correct, concise, precise, and respectful of the reader’s time. Professional e-mail need not be formal in tone, but casual messages must never descend into sloppiness. Educators, in particular, must think carefully when composing messages to students.

Correctness

Every professional e-mail message should be spelt correctly and employ correct grammar. The former can be accomplished, in part, through the use of automatic spell-checking (see e-mail skills check, below). Please be warned, however, that (inexplicably) our implementation of FirstClass uses a U.S. English dictionary, rather than a Canadian English dictionary. You’ll need to be on guard against the spell checker’s attempts to change your correct Canadian spellings, and a good defence (note the Canadian spelling!) is to add these properly spelt words to your personal dictionary.

Grammar can be checked in the usual ways: reading the text out loud, asking someone else to proof the text, using your computer’s text-to-speech facility (if one exists) to read the text to you. For especially important messages, you might consider composing the text in another application, such as Word, and employing the grammar checker of that application.

Concision

To respect the time of your readers, when posting e-mail and conference messages, follow these simple steps:

1. Enable discrimination Choose a subject line that allows readers to know, without opening your message, whether its contents are worth their attention. The best subject lines allow readers to delete unread messages without fear of missing something relevant. Consider which of the following you could fearlessly delete:
   • Staff meeting postponed until 15 September 2011
   • Staff meeting
   • List of grade-9 students excused from classes on September 15
   • Student list
   • Agenda for CL/ACL meetings of September 2nd and 3rd
   • September 2nd and 3rd
   • Missing: brown student desk taken from room 219
   • Help needed
   • Coaching opportunity: after-school recreational league
   • School sports
   • Reply required: staff holiday luncheon
   • Holiday lunch
2. Make each message count Politesse is always important and desirable, but the messages most wasteful of time in a hectic school year are those which say something like “good idea,” or “thanks.” If you’re requesting information or an action from a reader, or your providing your readers with information or notifying them of some task you’ve performed, consider ending your message with “thanks, in advance, for your reply,” or “no response necessary.” If in doubt, consider this: Was the information or action so important that you would interrupt your reader with a telephone call just to say “thanks”? If yes, then send such a message; if no, then consider the suggestion above.

Precision

When responding to an e-mail message or conference, quote material sufficient to remind your readers of the thread of the conversation, but be ruthless in editing the quoted material to the minimum required.

When replying to a message in FirstClass, highlight the original material you’d like to quote before selecting Reply. FirstClass will style the selected text as a quotation in the body of your message, and then you can edit judiciously.

Take particular care not to include the original attachments in your reply to messages, unless those attachments are crucial to the reply.

Skills check

✓	E-mail
☐	send a registered e-mail message to a colleague
☐	send an urgent e-mail message to a colleague
☐	send and then unsend an e-mail message to a colleague
☐	send to a colleague three e-mail messages with subject lines which allow for fearless deletion and three which do not, then ask that colleague if s/he agrees with your assessment of the subject lines
☐	in your Mailbox, experiment with View > Change View Properties … > Display; change one attribute, then click Apply to see its effect; when done, click OK to accept your changes, or click Default to return to the original View Properties
☐	experiment with selecting part of an existing e-mail message to see how that affects what’s quoted when you create a new message
☐	revise your message signature in Windows & Linux using Edit > Preferences > Messaging > Initial Content > Signature text in Mac OS using FirstClass > Preferences > Messaging > Initial Content > Signature text
☐	activate automatic spell-checking whenever a message is sent in Windows & Linux using Edit > Preferences > Content > Spell Check > Automatically check on send in MacOS using FirstClass > Preferences > Content > Spell Check > Automatically check on send
☐	create a new Receive Rule
☐	adjust the Message Expiry to suit your requirements

Please note: there's a stand-alone version of these checklists, suitable for printing.

touque.ca > Education Commons > Professional Development > FirstClass > E-mail

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