I’ve seen this around lately, and today at The Email Wars…

From Men’s Health “The Email to Don’t list” basically about business email ettiquette. While a lot of it I would discredit as “jaded whining” I do think it’s entertaining and definitely has some valid points!

Especially in email, where every word is taking up precious space, there is no room for bad writing. The thing about writing is it’s a skill everyone thinks they can do… but many do not take the time to master it.

If you’re guilty of bad writing (whether intentional or not) this list of the “Seven types of bad writing” from the Bad Language Blog can definitely help:

1. Thinks too much of itself. The UK satirical magazine, Private Eye runs a regular column lampooning the abuse of the word ‘solution.’ For example, Dow Corning’s “Innovative solutions for wound management,” which means “bandages.” This kind of word inflation devalues meaning and arouses the scepticism of readers.
2. Is too clever by half. For some reason, people are afraid to write how they speak. They want sound big, grown-up and clever. So they use big words and long sentences. For example, I was presented with this beauty at a school board meeting once: “the Governing Body are agreeing this budget as the financial mechanism to support the education priorities of the school as identified in the School Development Plan and will adhere to the best value principles in spending its school funding allocation.” It meant, “We approve the budget.”
3. Gets hyped up. Press releases often include frankenquotes. These are made-up quotations that bear no resemblance to normal speech. For example: “Nortel has established a legacy in innovation and will continue to push the envelope…” Try saying that in a pub to your friends. See if they still listen to you afterwards. Or trust you.
4. Tells lies. In the UK, journalists score low in public trust. Somewhere near politicians and spin doctors. However, good journalists are obsessive about research, accuracy, good reporting, details and, yes, truth. What works for newspaper stories also works for business communication.
5. Ignores the reader. As a writer, the greatest skill is to think about what the reader needs to hear, not what you need to say. It takes an imaginative leap. For example, Google says “Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual yada, yada.” Microsoft says “This software is licensed under the agreement below.” Which one is more likely to be read?
6. Needs to go on a diet. Most writing can be improved by liposuction. Consider the Gettysburg Address. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said it best: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” This is especially true when writing for the web, when you need to cut the word count by about 50 percent.
7. Has no direction. My favourite tutor at Oxford told me that I had to take my essays and drive them like Ayrton Senna (a famous racing driver). Good writing has a strong purpose. Bad writing has either no direction or has too many

Ok I’ve been busy over here, so not much time for blogging. But I wanted to post something, and then I found something great over at the Email Wars blog that’s pretty crazy!

Anti-spam firm SpamHaus has been ordered to pay 11.7M for blacklisting a legitimate email marketer. Maybe it’s time we at card start investigating who is blacklisting us!

More details at the Email Wars blog…

If you’ve ever tested emails in Lotus Notes, you know what a pain it can be. Especially for your clickable TOC - since anchor tags will not work - and not only do they not work they bring you to a “404 page not found” error in the browser - which looks like a big mistake.

Two simple alternatives to anchor tags that will work splendidly in all email clients:

1. If your email is short - i.e. doesn’t need much scrolling anyway, link directly to your article jump pages.
2. If your email is long, with more complex content - link to the anchor tags on the browser version of the email (this WILL work in Lotus)

Try it out! I’m not sure exactly how many people are using Lotus, but I’ve seen stats that suggest a lot, so you may want to consider this when creating emails, especially with a B2B audience!

So I almost went a whole week without posting. Holy cow! (At least it was a short week)

But I just couldn’t do it…

Anyway, Jeff from Return on Subscriber reveals that outlook junk filtering is totally based on content, not reputation as, he states, ReturnPath would tell you. He also included a great list of triggers for outlook so I strongly suggest you take a look!