With email swiftly becoming the main means of communication between many of today’s professionals, knowing how to craft a professional email has become essential.  Not only will it make you look good to your prospective clients or peers, but it will also make the contents of your message clearer to your intended audience.

The following is a list of three common professional email do’s and don’ts:

DO

• Always spell-check your email before it goes out.  If you use Outlook, you can set it so that the spell-check always runs before an email is sent.  There’s nothing that irritates me more than when I get an email from a colleague and “the” is misspelled.

• Always include your contact information in your signature when dealing with clients.  This is essential as some clients prefer to talk on the phone or meet face to face than communicate through email.  A good way to remember this is to add it to your signature.

• Always check to make sure that you’ve attached any files you want to send with the email BEFORE you send it out.  Those “Oh, here’s the attachment because I forgot to send it the first seven times” emails are extremely annoying.

DON’T

• Never use internet shorthand or slang in a formal email.  For example, always spell out “You” instead of using “U”.  This may sound like common sense, but you would be surprised how many people let this slip, especially when they are switching between writing personal and professional email.

• Never copy additional clients or peers on the email unless you are absolutely sure that it is ok to do so.  On the client side, you never know what kind of internal politics are going on, so always check with your supervisor first.  Also, internally, sometimes an email should only go to certain people on your team, so once again check with your supervisor before sending it out.

• Never send a lot of personal correspondence through your work email.  An occasional email is fine, but many times companies screen their employees email, and they don’t like to see a lot of personal email taking up much of your time.  They also might object to content sent to you by your friends.

Overall, when you’re writing an email at work, try to pretend that instead of writing you are presenting the contents to your boss.  If your email passes that filter, then it should be fine to send.  Otherwise, it’s probably a good idea to create another draft.