Reading Response Week 2
Chapter 27 was very interesting; I send all kinds of emails on a daily basis. There was a lot of information that was covered in chapter 27 that I had never learned about or thought about before. I send emails to friends and family very often but I also send emails at my internship everyday. Actually when I got into work today my inbox had about fifteen emails that I had to respond to.
It can be a very hard thing to do sometimes because first you have to analyze what the person who emailed you is trying to say and then what they want in response from you. In my internship I have to be very formal and precise because the people who are emailing me are either customers or our vendors asking questions or answering questions that I have asked previously. A lot of times I have to go digging and do a lot of research or find additional information from files or other people just to reply to any email. From time to time I have written an email that has provoked a mistake.
For example, today I was doing too many things as once because it was right before lunch and I wanted to get this email out with a quote attached. I edited a quote for a customer to attach to this email but for some reason the quote didn’t save to right place. When I went to attach the edited quote to the email I accidentally attached the unedited quote. Good thing I always double check emails before I send them and I caught my mistake! Otherwise this would have been a pretty bad mistake.
I did use two of the ten habits of successful emailers but only because I double checked my whole email before sending it. First I used the third habit which is taking some time to edit and revise my message before I sent it. I also used habit number nine which is when I sent the attachment; I identified what I sent in the message and file. Looking over the list I did use many of the other habits but corresponding to my close mistake today at my internship. Email is such an important communication tool in business, it is easy and quick but yet a formal way of communication.
Comments
Good Catch
There's always a sense of relief and horror when you find a terrible mistake like that in an email. A friend of mine accidentally sent out a rather insulting joke to an entire department instead of the friend he intended, allowing even the butt of the joke to read the email. Those experiences usually show people the value of double checking, though it's amazing how many people never learn from these mistakes. I get students who send bad email after email, and I worry about them when they get into a corporate setting. Hopefully, at the most, it takes only one major mishap before people learn their lesson. I'm sure that CEO did.
Reply
I think it's always a good idea to add into the message what is being sent in the attachment. Too many times I receive emails from other coworkers or classmates and have no idea what the attachment in pertaining to. I have learned through my current internship to always say what I'm attaching in order to help me understand what I'm sending and also to help the person receiving to understand what the importance of the email is. Usually things I send out are down on the lower end of importance but still need to be answered for the project to continue. It really helps the architect know what the order of importance of things he could answer.
reading comment
Two days ago, I had to send a presentation for my boss which was urgent. Before going to lunch, I was certain that I sent the presentation along with the email. When I got there after my lunch hour my boss was waiting desperately for me because I sent out the email without the attatchment! I was not carefull enough to check that I did the email in the correct way. I agree with you when you say that email is an important communication tool in business, but everybody has to be careful since their content could cause a lof of controversies like what happened to the CEO. I simple click on the mouse can change or cause many unfortunate events.
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I agree with you when you said that emails are very important in the business world. It helps employess communicate so that they don't have to keep moving up and down the office every 5 mins to communicate. i also think that people should what there attachments are about in the emails messages because it is very annoying when u open an attachment and you don't know what it is about. It has happened to me a bunch of times.