Netiquette IQ: A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email

Fast, actionable, and environmentally friendly, email has evolved into a powerful form of both business and personal communications. “Netiquette IQ: A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email” is a complete “how to” book on electronic communications which exhaustively details the rules, practices, and preferred use of language to improve the civility and lucidity of email. Using email etiquette (Netiquette) each communication can reduce the all-too-common misunderstandings which overwhelm email and electronic communications. Written by career technology sales and marketing professional Paul Babicki, Netiquette IQ is the “Elements of Style” for the Information Age, at last defining good Netiquette so that all email users are on the same virtual page. Good Netiquette gives the sender an edge in delivering clear, readable emails; empowers job interview results and resume reading by prospective employers; provides a means to incorporate a sense of process to your email communications; prevents unnecessary misunderstandings; and encourages and promotes better relationships. This book offers any of the over four billion email users useful information on every page for every email. Starting with the correct use of the “To” and “From” fields and continuing on to the proper way to respond to spam, invitations, and more, this logically organized reference guide will give you the proper procedure to best present yourself or your company no matter what the circumstance. Are emoticons acceptable in short emails? Is there a limit to the numbers of emails you should send? “Netiquette IQ: A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email” spells out every possible scenario. Readers will receive the definitive position on simple format rules, text options, punctuation, epolicy, tone, email threads, and much more. You’ll not only learn how to respond to emails, but also learn when not to respond to them. Mr. Babicki also includes a list of “dangerous” emails, as well as ten basic precepts for acceptable email etiquette, and clarifies issues like plagiarism and privacy. A Netiquette test can be taken (get it from the Netiquette IQ website) so you can see your email IQ score. Following the suggestions in the book will improve almost anyone's rating. Be confident that your email messages are being received when –and how—you intend them to be. You will find you can empower your email with Netiquette IQ. Purchasing this book is an investment for the present and the future. Netiquette IQ provides not only the email information you need but offers an extensive reference section serving as a resource for years to come. Further information can be found on the book’s website, blog, its Facebook page and on Twitter.

A revealing primer on the art of effective emails and other communications. Babicki, in his debut self-help guide, covers the many peculiarities of computerized messaging: How to shape an eye-catching subject line; how to troubleshoot error messages from a returned email; what the file-extension suffixes on attachments mean; what the email time stamp tells others about your personality (night owl vs. early riser); and how to craft a corporate email security policy. His advice on these sometimes-arcane topics is precise—“RTF format should only be used when it is certain that the recipient uses Outlook”—while also remaining intelligible to laypeople. The author also instructs readers on time-honored principles of proper English and clear expression. He delves with detailed lucidity into rules of grammar, punctuation and usage; prescribes the proper formatting of numbers and dates; and inveighs against the dangling participle. He also explores the tonal shadings of different kinds of salutations, crusades for concise and gracious style, warns against the gassy redundancy of such wordings as “final outcome” and “at an early time,” and appends a blacklist of “the most irritating phrases,” from “out of the box” to “team player.” Good writing grows from good thinking, so he instructs readers on the pitfalls of logical fallacies, from the ad hominem attack to the begged question, and on the distinctions between assumption, presumption and inference. Furthermore, since communication is the cornerstone of civilized life, he limns its legal and moral underpinnings in copyright and plagiarism strictures, codes of courteous Internet deportment and techniques for pacifying flame wars. (He recommends a “Zen” approach, for example, in replying to angry missives.) The result is a mashup of Strunk and White, Miss Manners, Aristotle and Microsoft Help, all laid out in a well-organized, very readable text sprinkled with amusing examples and phrased in the tart, aphoristic style of an exacting schoolmaster (“The better it sounds, the more it is trusted”). Overall, Babicki’s technical expertise and literary aplomb make this a fine manual for the everyday scribe. A comprehensive, stimulating guide to getting the word out.