SEND: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better [Paperback]

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.

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

"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.