Communication Skills

“How not to act old at work”

By November 22, 2008 No Comments

If you’re over 30, you’ve got to read this November 20 article from CNN.Money.com.

I particularly like the part about the difference between texting and emailing and how it’s okay to use abbreviations when texting, but not silly stuff like OMG!

The only advice I wonder about is the “caps optional.”  I agree that one day this will work for us but every bit of research I read verifies (here is an exciting one for you to check out from  American Journal of Pyschological Research [which is how I spend my Saturday’s and explains why you want me to tell you this stuff instead of having to read it all yourself] is that it’s easier for the reader to read and comprehend the message when the standard upper case/lower case format is used. Because we’re still programmed to read that way, it can take up to 43% longer to digest words in all lower case. Throw in poor punctuation, and now your really making your reader work (which may be okay with some readers because they love you and may not be okay with others, because they don’t).

As I say, the more we do it, the more used to it we’ll all become. Kind of like how I felt all thumbs when I first started texting on my iPhone (get it?!). Now, I can text (one-handed) almost as fast as I can type (one-handed). So what comes first, the chicken or the egg?

From my (boomer) and self-annointed email queen perspective, I’m sticking with recommending using sentence case when writing because I want to make it as easy for my reader to read and respond to me as possible. if they want to write back in all lower case i won’t complain because my job is to make their life easy

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