Its OK to be casual on a blog

With fewer and fewer business communications taking place face-to-face, and a whole generation now out of school and in the office that would rather text than talk to someone, the importance of written etiquette has grown.

If e-mail is the button-down Monday of the business world, then blogs are the increasingly popular casual Fridays.  Grammar and spell check should always still apply to an e-mail, but not so much in a blog.  Whereas it is not proper to use all caps (and thus imply yelling) in an e-mail, emotion is readily expressed in a blog.  Everyone groans when they get an e-mail with FW:FW:FW or RE:RE:RE in the header, but blogs are there to encourage conversation and illicit a response.

Lauren Rikleen, author of "Ending the Gauntlet," has a great article on this very topic.  She lives for the day that we can all come into the office and get the ‘out-of-office’ assistant universally displaying the following message:

The endless stream of e-mails, and the expectation that people are constantly available to read them, is leading to incalculable inefficiency and impairing the quality of life.  According, if you would like to reach me, please call.

If you’d like the full text of Lauren’s article, just respond and we’ll fax it to you.