The Random House rep brought a couple of copies and no one seemed to want either of the ARCs, so because I love free books, I grabbed one. That may be because of the audience. In a big bookstore, very few employees are using email for business purposes. And despite the subtitle, the book is primarily about writing email in a business environment. Unlike my co-workers this spring, I’ve got some history with writing lots of email in a business environment. Plus, it’d be an easy read I thought.

First thing Send covers is the ubiquity of email and some of the temptations of using it for everything. The authors provide a pretty good rationale for avoiding the use of email in a lot of situations. Email has lots of drawbacks. It often lacks context. It’s easy and so often unnecessary. It provides a record of what you wrote. But even while originals of what you wrote may exist, others can alter what you’ve written (intentionally or otherwise) and misrepresent you. For instance, it’s much better to make a phone call (if you are angry or stupid, your words can’t be forwarded verbatim), or set up a meeting (much easier to figure out what multiple people think). However, some of their advice is misguided or wrong. They encourage using Adobe’s PDF format to send things that can’t be altered. PDF files can be altered, though perhaps not by as many people as could alter other formats. They also note that every email is an interruption (while asserting that a letter is not). This is misguided. Email is only an interruption to those who haven’t learned how to manage their inbox. This topic of managing your time with email isn’t covered in the book.

They have a couple of chapters covering the various parts of an email and how to use them to write effective emails. The parts on the use of the To, CC, and Bcc lines for addressing email needed to be required reading at my former employer, Expedia. There, within the 3rd or 4th iteration of any email thread, the number of recipients had usually grown to include everyone from the receptionists to the C.E.O. I think Shipley and Schwalbe missed that part of many office cultures where people get added to cover someone’s ass. The belief is that people who need to know will (or should) read everything that comes through their inbox and if they don’t and fail to object, then it’s not the underlings fault for going ahead. Which is bogus, but the tendency exists. They also have a tip for my pet peeve as someone who reviewed a lot of resumes: include your name in your resume filename. PhilipWeissResume.odf is a lot more useful than Resume.odf. I often had to rename resume files so person A’s resume file didn’t overwrite person B’s file.

I think the remaining chapters on the various forms of writing in email are less useful. Most business-people have a good understanding of when they are requesting something or responding to something. They have a good idea of their status within a company and how that affects responses. Most blather on anyway, but they are aware of it. The short chapter on the S.E.N.D. acrononym (for simple, effective, necessary, and done) I think is one of the few places where anything is really said about necessary. We’re a loquacious people. We think our opinions are important. I know I think mine is. A lot of people need to be told to just not write email because their opinion just isn’t necessary. My opinion here isn’t necessary either, but that’s your own damn fault for coming to my web site or subscribing to the feed.

Title: Send : the essential guide to email for office and home
Authors: David Shipley,Will Schwalbe
Imprint / publisher: Alfred A. Knopf / Random House
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 240 p. (includes index)
Publication date: April 2007
ISBN-10: 0-307-26364-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-307-26364-3
Subject: Electronic mail messages
Subject: Business communication
Subject: Communication in management
Subject: Interpersonal communication
LC classification: HD30.37 .S5 2007