Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home

When should you email, and when should you call, fax, or just show up?

What is the crucial—and most often overlooked—line in an email?

What is the best strategy when you send (in anger or error) a potentially career-ending electronic bombshell?

Enter Send. Whether you email just a little or never stop, use a desktop or a handheld, here, at last, is an authoritative and delightful book that shows how to write the perfect email—at work, at school, or anywhere. Send also points out the numerous (but not always obvious) times when email can be the worst option and might land you in hot water (or even jail!).

The secret is, of course, to think before you click. Send is nothing short of a survival guide for the digital age—wise, brimming with good humor, and filled with helpful lessons from the authors’ own email experiences (and mistakes). In short: absolutely e-ssential.

David Shipley is the deputy editorial page editor and Op-Ed page editor of The New York Times, where he has also served as national enterprise editor and senior editor at The New York Times Magazine. Previously, he was executive editor of The New Republic and a senior presidential speechwriter in the Clinton administration.

Will Schwalbe is senior vice president and editor in chief of Hyperion Books. Previously he was a journalist, writing articles and reviews for such publications as The New York Times, the South China Morning Post, Insight for Asian Investors, Ms. Magazine, and Business Traveller Asia.