The Business Style Handbook, Second Edition: An A-to-Z Guide for Effective Writing on the Job, 2nd Edition

5EMAIL: BEFORE YOU HIT SEND

EMAIL REMAINS THE PRIMARY TOOL for business communication, despite the proliferation of other platforms such as texting, IMing and social networking. Among the Fortune 500 companies surveyed for the second edition of this book, email remains the most frequently used communications tool by far, with 87% of respondents saying they use it all the time (the remaining 13% use it frequently).

That said, a major shift has occurred in email usage over the past decade. Now, corporate email systems are integrated with mobile devices, so that business emails are sent, received and read on BlackBerrys, Android phones and iPhones, as well as tablets and laptops. This trend has impacted business email in several ways.

In addition, ...