English 420Y - Business Writing Online

Oh man, oh man, did Neal Patterson ever screw up. Even if Patterson's "stinging" e-mail hadn’t caused a stock plummet it would have caused his managers to have at least some sort of ill will towards him. The article is exactly right when it says that you never send that sort of mass message via e-mail. You need to be specific of you are going to be that harsh, so he either needed to verbally address his managers or send that e-mail to people that he KNEW to be the issue.

From the readings of the past couple days, we can really start to grasp the importance of writing resumes. Reading the posts that were given Monday, I have a new understanding of what I should and should not include in my own personal resume. Honestly if I had not read through each one of the texts provided, I can almost guarantee I would have cluttered up my writing with a bunch of nonsense that would have been irrelevant to the point of the job I was applying for.

I think we should all be pretty familiar with most of the material covered in the textbook on emails by now. A specific thing that I really feel is worth mentioning is the advice on never reply to an important or for that reason a harsh email immediately. We should always think thoroughly and calmly before replying to something that aggravate our emotions; in result could cause us to respond inappropriately.

I agree with E. Ralph Biggadike, in The Stinging Office Memo, that email nowadays is overused. It is very hard to communicate and "promote a dialogue" between other people. I believe it is very hard to tell what kind of emotion is being used and is also impersonal. The perception of the email can be misinterpreted by the reader when the selection of words were not thoughtfully designed. For some people they use the use of email as a scapegoat to avoid contact with others and situations. Some of the benefits of email is that it is very cheap, convenient, and extremely fast in networking.

I haven’t really had a whole lot of experience with sending out formal emails. While I do work at a place that uses email frequently to communicate with the home office, I rarely do the emailing myself. I do, however, use email to communicate with members of my sorority. With close to one hundred girls in the house, email is a very important communication tool, as well as, the most effective. I’ve learned that the tone of an email makes the difference on how the reader reacts.

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.

In response to the article about the CEO who sent out an "angry" email to all of his employees accusing them of not working to their full potential, I felt that this was a ludicrous method in trying to motivate his workers. First off, why would a man of his power send out an email of that nature to everyone in the company?

I honestly didnt know that there were so many rules and etiquette (netiquette) about sending emails. But after doing the reading, I can defintely see how people may break some of the standards by accident. I know I like emails that are straight and to the point. And it does bother me when people take ridiculous amounts of time to respond to my emails. Also, since most of the time I use my home (parent's) computer, large attachments or pictures are just annoying.

In the resume readings I thought it was interesting how often it was noted that employers do not spend hardly any time at all going over resumes. The times that they said were just around thirty seconds. This does not seem like a lot of time for an employer to evaluate someone, so it just shows how important it is to do a good job on your resume. You must make sure that you get to the point and also use keywords that they will be looking for. It is also important to make sure that it is presentable and looks well developed.