Has the following ever happened to you? You write an email that asks two questions, and you get a reply only to the first. Or you send someone an informational email, talk to them afterward, and realize that they missed the last paragraph. This happens to me more frequently than I like.
I have a hypothesis. People miss the end of my emails because I don't have an email signature. They're so used to ignoring a block of text at the end of an email that my actual content is collateral damage.
So, for the good of society, I propose for everyone to remove their email signature. When it's there, you as the reader simply ignore it.
I've seen signatures that list the sender's phone numbers. I've seen signatures that include quotations from famous people. (At times, quotations from the sender that the sender believes are dripping with brilliant wisdom.) I've seen multi-paragraph signatures that raise a storm in a teacup about not disseminating the email without permission and deleting the email immediately if you're not the reader. In a particularly egregious case, I've seen a photo scan of someone's business card used as the signature. Actually, scratch that. The most egregious case is signatures that contain the sender's email address. Holy shit.
It's tempting to have a signature just in case someone wants—nay, needs!—your fax number. You may have been told by a well-meaning parent or significant other that a signature gives a professional appearance. Heck, you may have added a signature just because everyone else has one.
And why not? We don't pay by the word for email. Except it's not free. You're decreasing the value of your communications. You dilute your main point with a block of text that has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Worse, it signals to your reader that you value their time so little that you're going make them read a block of text that's guaranteed to be irrelevant. I don't take kindly to that.
Remove your email signature. Remove noise. Show your readers that you value their time. Make your content stand alone. And you ever doubt this decision, just ask: WWSJD?
I've noticed that long, faux-professional signatures are common with computer science majors. Maybe it's because they like to mess with every setting possible, whereas other people don't care to alter their signature settings. I recently exchanged emails with a fellow undergrad student whose signature was:
ReplyDeleteName Name
Professional Job Title | Class of 20--
College of Engineering | University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
my-emailaddress@uiowa.edu
555.555.5555 mobile
Seriously? Who does this person think he or she is? Gee, thanks for giving me your zip code and EMAIL ADDRESS. And I could have never guessed that you're in Iowa City, Iowa and the University of Iowa based on your uiowa.edu email address. I guess I can't just Google "uiowa" to find all that information if I really wanted it.
I have a high opinion of this person, but had no idea how arrogant he or she was until I saw this fucked-up signature.
Huh. I do have e-mail signatures setup at work. I added the following to the end.
ReplyDelete---
Sent from my EliteBook8430w
Just in case anyone was wondering which device I'm using to send my e-mails. It's absolutely vital that my co-workers know this.
I think a full signature with name, title, department, and the relevant phone numbers is useful if you're contating someone outside of your organization the first few times. That way they get some idea of who you are. However anyone you're frequently interacting with probably already knows all this information.