A colleague sent me a link to an article in the Washington Post pondering in a rather amusing way about e-mail decorum. The author does so by deconstructing and attempting to "decode" an e-mail thread that includes recipients irrelevant to the conversation, and is protracted by the default "reply to all" action most people take when participating in such threads. Much has been written about e-mail etiquette in the past, so I won't elaborate on the article too much.
One aspect to the article that I can't help but comment on, however, is how it characterizes the (over)use of exclamation points and question marks in typical e-mail communication, something I've caught myself doing too much of in the last few years. This brings me to the point on how much business English has changed -- for the worst -- not only because of e-mail and instant messaging, but now because of channels MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Twitter, tremendously growing in popularity (I've seen a 10 fold growth in my colleagues getting on board in the last two weeks), limits everyone to 140 characters per tweet, so it requires shorthand through a whole new dialect. Writing on one's Facebook Wall, dropping messages into Super Pokes and the like demands another flavor of quick, snappy (and hip) conversation.
With these networks and others being used more and more in a business context, I fear that we'll see Twitter speak or Facebook-ese bleed its way into places where good old-fashioned business English is needed and expected, which is most business e-mail correspondence, not to mention other business documents. I'm already seeing it.
Now, not to come across as a Gen X curmudgeon, I'm all for certain new flavors of business English -- dialects appropriate for Twitter or Facebook or Flickr or whatever. But, the traditional style of "old English" will never go away and we will do our best to make sure of that here.
