Chapter 1: Drafting a Professional Email
Netiquette
We create personal pages, post messages, and interact via mediated technologies as a normal part of our lives, but how we conduct ourselves can leave a lasting image, literally. Several years ago, when the internet was a new phenomenon, Virginia Shea laid out a series of ground rules for communication online that continue to serve us today.
Virginia Shea’s Rules of Netiquette
- Remember the human on the other side of the electronic communication.
- Adhere to the same standards of behaviour online that you follow in real life.
- Know where you are in cyberspace.
- Respect other people’s time and bandwidth.
- Share expert knowledge.
- Respect other people’s privacy.
- Don’t abuse your power.
- Be forgiving of other people’s mistakes (Shea, 1994).
One of the really difficult things about this particular moment in workplace communication is that many people have to be online for their jobs, but risk online is unevenly distributed. For example, one 11-year study found that 71% of victims in online harassment cases were women[1]. Racialized people also experience more harassment. A Pew study found that 25% of black Americans had been harassed because of their race online.[2]. LGBTQ2S+ youth are also three times more likely to experience online harassment.[3].
When you post online, it’s great to upload standards of professionalism, but it’s also important to think about the wider context around you. For example, you might use Twitter to follow experts in your field from diverse backgrounds and open yourself up to perspectives you might not have considered.
References
Bovee, C., & Thill, J. (2010). Business communication essentials: A skills-based approach to vital business English (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Guffey, M. (2008).Essentials of business communication(7th ed.). Mason, OH: Thomson/Wadsworth.
Shea, V. (1994).Netiquette. San Francisco, CA: Albion Books.
Attribution
This chapter contains material taken from Introduction to Professional Communications is (c) 2018 by Melissa Ashman and is licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
This chapter also contains material taken from Memos, which is published on WritingCommons.org. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
