How To Write an E-Mail

I live overseas and I use e-mail for the majority of my communication needs. I also receive some really, really poorly written e-mails from people I hold in high esteem. STOP IT! The Wired How-To Wiki provides the following guidelines for writing e-mail, as does the blog of Guy Kawasaki (VC, evangelist, etc.). Though I agree with most of what is written in both of these articles, I'm not sure I agree with all of it. Feel free to comment with your preferred e-mail style tips.

Click here to read the Wired article.

Guy Kawasaki has what I view to be more complete, more useful tips for e-mailing, which you can find here and should read immediately if you ever plan to send another e-mail. I especially like "add a good signature," which a lot of people don't. I want to know who you are instead of having to try to find your organization's Website, find the contacts page, and hope and pray to Jesus that you're on there. COME ON!

On Obsolete Languages

Michael Erard, a designer not a linguist, commented on When Languages Die, a book by well-known linguistic anthropologist K. David Harrison. Harrison laments the death of languages due to the specific knowledge lost in the process, from specifics about dates, agriculture, and familial relationships, to the grammatical features of these languages, which are often unique.

Back when I took sociolinguistics in college, we discussed the extinction of languages, and supposedly within the next century, half of the languages now spoken will be forgotten if undocumented. Now, I'm all for the recording of these languages, but languages are constantly evolving, and, much like the evolution of humans caused the extinction of other related bipedal species (neanderthals), a "stronger" language is going to overtake weaker languages, eventually rendering it obsolete.

Strong languages such as English, Mandarin, Spanish, etc., are always going to overtake the hundreds of weaker languages. Economics play a factor, as do subjects of cultural relevance in areas like religion and politics, but so do the abilities of a language to evolve to keep pace with the objects encountered in contemporary developed society. Borrowing dilutes a language's purest form (e.g., Russian), but language maintenance is important to relevance. As an example, French has a group of scholars that are responsible for updating the language to keep pace with technology and other developments, rather than just borrowing a word from another language such as English. This group of scholars is ineffective, but their efforts are often overlooked. It is because of them that the French language, despite the dwindling number of native speakers in comparison with several other languages, has maintained its place as one of the most spoken languages in the world.

In conclusion, maintain languages or record them and let them go. We don't use DOS anymore, but we still use information we gathered from it.

From Design Observer, via Wired.