"As per my email..."

Anyone born since about 1990 will have little idea what life without email was like, and for most of us - regardless of when we were born -life without email now would be hard to contemplate. Both in business and in our private lives, email has gone from novelty, to useful, to pretty much indispensable. For most people working in an office environment, an email account is a necessity, and in our private lives, online activities such as shopping or maintaining a social media presence would be nigh-on impossible without one. Yet as recently as the late 1990's, an email account in the workplace was a privilege rather than a right or necessity, and I remember having to put forward a strong business case to be granted one by my employer, and had to be even more insistent that it allowed me to send and receive external emails rather than just within the company.

Remember the days when accessing your emails meant starting with a menu that looked like this?

Because of the era in which I started work, and because of the organisation I worked for, my letter writing has always been rather formal in nature; it was not just the norm, it was expected, and use of vernacular would be discouraged, or removed from letters that went for signature by a manager. As a result, I carried that style forward into my email writing, so that my messages would be peppered with expressions like, "As per our telephone conversation," and "I should be grateful if you would," or "Many thanks in anticipation of your prompt reply." I find myself still using this sort of language when writing emails, usually to the Customer Service departments of various organisations, and especially if I am making a complaint. 

My email writing style would probably fall foul of the participants of a recent survey conducted by software company Adobe, who found that the most annoying phrase used in emails is, "Not sure if you saw my last email," closely followed by "Per my last email," with "Per our conversation," and "As discussed" also featuring prominently. Since three of those appear in a great many of the emails that I compose, I figure that I would be seen as somewhere between quite irritating and very annoying.

The most annoying phrases used in emails, as per the tardy, inefficient, and work-shy.

 

One thing that the apparently annoying phrases have in common it seems is the fact that they are most likely to be used in an email that is sent by someone who has not received a reply to a previous message. In that case, the recipient has less cause to be annoyed than the sender, as in my opinion, the most annoying thing about emails and email users is the inability that some people have to respond to straightforward requests. While email has made our ability to communicate so much easier, it has also made us less effective in doing so. When I think back to the various roles that I had in my career, one thing that strikes me is how much more correspondence I received with email compared with the amount I got before. Before email - and regardless of what job I was doing in the organisation I worked for - I would come back to work after a fortnight's holiday and be faced with a couple of memos or letters that were for me to deal with personally, a couple of bits of work that my stand-in had not had time to complete, and perhaps a couple of phone messages. By the time I left the bank in 2012, I would be faced with somewhere approaching 400 unread emails in my inbox when I returned to the office after a couple of weeks off. As a result, I would probably spend most of my first day back sorting out the wheat from the chaff, filing or deleting the superfluous and the duplicates, paring that 400 down to the fifty or so that actually needed some sort of action.

Some people's inboxes would look like this if translated into actual bits of paper.

Plenty of people that I worked with seemed incapable of keeping on top of their inbox, however. There were people whose screen you would see with their email a sea of red, with something like 'Inbox (655)' appearing prominently. Of course, if you know anyone like that, it is pretty pointless sending them an email in the first place, let alone a chaser.

But if you do need to chase someone, how to do it? Certainly, the respondents to Adobe's survey seem more upset that you, the sender, have had the temerity to chase them than they are about the fact that they haven't responded to you. If "Not sure if you saw my last email," and "Per my last email" are frowned upon, how do you address the matter of non-response? William Hanson, etiquette expert and author of The Bluffer's Guide To Etiquette, suggests that the writer makes it look as though their own email is at fault (yes, really). He proposes that one writes, "I don't think you got my last email as my email server has been having a bit of a meltdown."  A mealy-mouthed "Not sure if you saw my last email," is too much of a cop-out without straight up lying and shifting the blame and responsibility away from the person who is actually at fault, i.e. the recipient, and placing it squarely on one's own shoulders - and that of your IT department or email provider. The thinking behind this is that it gives the person who has not responded, an 'out' as Hanson describes it. This is frankly, nonsense and is presumably driven by the desire not to upset the person you are writing to, or to put it more bluntly,  accept their tardiness and inefficiency.

 If I send you an email and you don't respond within what I think is a reasonable period of time, be prepared to receive one that starts, "I refer to my email of (date) regarding (insert subject matter). To date I am unable to trace a reply from you and shall therefore be grateful if you will acknowledge receipt of this message and respond to my enquiry as soon as possible, and by (insert date) at the latest." Now you may think that somewhat formal - pompous even - but I am unapologetic. I am not going to let you off the hook for not replying, nor will I accept responsibility for it, and while I understand that sometimes a full, comprehensive response can take some time, an acknowledgement takes seconds and keeps me off your back until such time as you can give me a complete response. This is especially true these days when email clients, particularly on mobile devices, have pre-formatted replies and acknowledgements that can be sent with just a couple of taps of the screen.

If I receive an email that includes one of these phrases, I am more annoyed about the fact that someone has had cause to send it to me than I am about the phrase itself, which after all is merely a way of introducing the core of the message. For my money, Adobe's survey is more damning of the people who are receiving these messages than it is of the people who are sending them.