Dear Legal Writing Pro (or is that "Hi Legal Writing Pro"?),
My colleagues and I constantly argue about e-mail greetings and closings. Do we need them? Is "Dear" better than "Hi"? Commas or colons? Does any of this even matter?
My Response
Dear Tongue-Tied,Yes, it matters! According to one New Zealand study, happy workplaces and unhappy workplaces favor different email greetings and closings.
| Type of workplace | Most common greetings | Most common closings |
|---|---|---|
| High morale, Warm | Hi, Ross, | Regards, Ross Thanks, Ross |
| Low morale, Cold | no greeting | no closing just "Ross" |
These findings mirror "emotional intelligence" teachings as well as Dale Carnegie's famous insight that the sweetest sound is the sound of your own name. They also support the conclusions I've drawn from the many (and often contradictory) e-mail authorities in print and on the Web.
To sum up:
Best greetings for a single recipient
- Hi, Ross,
- Hi Ross, (technically wrong without the comma after "Hi" but very widely used and considered idiomatic)
- Dear Mr. Guberman, (for strangers in formal settings)
- Greetings,
- Regards, Ross
- Best regards, Ross
- Kind regards, Ross
- Thanks, Ross
- Best wishes, Ross
- no greeting
- Ross,
- Ross:
- no closing
- just "Ross"
- Sincerely,
Ross
4 comments:
I have to say I disagree -- at least in the context of intra-office emails. Call me "cold," but I am a fan of no greeting/closing. First, they are redundant; you can see who an email is to/from by simply looking at the email header. Second, they are overly-formal when communication with a person on a regular basis. Finally, I would never say "greeting" or "regards" out loud, so I'm not writing these things in each and every email.
Shirley raises an excellent point: What's the right model for a business e-mail? Is it a business letter? A phone call? A face-to-face conversation?
I also understand the point that greetings and closings can be seen as redundant. But what to make of the NZ study finding that high-morale employers inspire more greetings and closings among the employees than low-morale employers do?
Dear Ross,
With regard to the "best closings," the punctuation on at least some of your suggestions seems to be off. "Thanks," for example, should be followed by a period and not a comma. Your examples are widely used and, perhaps, considered idiomatic. But at least when it comes to "thanks," the technical difference in meaning between the period and he comma is most obvious. While I don't recall ever seeing the other example closings followed by a period, "thanks" is one that at least some people punctuate correctly. What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks for the diversion from watching the first snowflakes fall in DC.
The comma is there because "thanks" precedes the sender's name:
Thanks,
Ross
I might have confused things by putting these on the same line to save space.
Note that ending an e-mail with just "Thanks." is controversial. The authors of Send, the bestselling book on e-mails at the workplace, note that "Thanks." at the end of an e-mail is often interpreted as a sign of anger. They say the same about such statements as "Please remember to include me on the distribution next time."
Bottom line, without body language or voice inflection, "please" and "thanks" in isolation can come across the wrong way in our highly sensitive society.
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