Information Literacy

Week 01 — Professional communication tools

Up to 10 points can be gained towards your final score.

1. Introduce yourself to the class [2 points]

Log in to MS Teams using your university account and post a short message to the Self Introduction channel of the Information Literacy team. Introduce yourself, your main interest(s), and say which topics of Information Literacy you already have experience with. (Throughout the course, use the Q&A (English) and/or 質疑応答 (日本語) channels to ask any questions you might have about the course or the content of the classes. If you can answer a question posted there, please do not hesitate to do so.)

2. Use e-mail for professional communication [8 points]

One of our teaching assistants (TAs) will send you an e-mail asking you to send a reply with an interesting or funny image attached. Our TAs are official members of the teaching staff for this class and so your reply should follow proper “netiquette”. It should be professional, formal, and polite. Use any reference materials you can to make sure your reply is professional, for example the notes posted on the course web site or articles/blogs about writing e-mail that you can find by searching online. When you think your reply has been properly prepared, send it to our TA.

Using proper netiquette in your e-mail includes

• using an appropriate subject line, greeting, closing, signature, and “signature block” with your professional details;
• using proper sentences, grammar, and punctuation
• quoting the relevant parts of the original messages when you reply to questions; and
• providing any relevant files as attachments to your reply.

3. Bonus [1 point]

Continue to use the Q&A (English) and/or 質疑応答 (日本語) channels to post and answer questions about the course content. Students who contribute outstanding answers to the Q&A (English) channel might gain a bonus point towards their final score.

Further practice

Team up with one other student from the class (e.g., the student who sits next to you). Send your partner a professional “business” e-mail asking if they would be willing to help you improve your communication skills. Be formal and polite, as you would when seeking a business partnership with someone you do not know personally.

Read the e-mail that you receive from your partner. Think of ways that it could be improved. Write a formal reply that explains how you think they could improve their e-mail to you. When you receive the reply suggesting how to improve your original e-mail, reply one more time formally thanking your partner for their time and kindness.

What you will learn from this class

• What kinds of professional communications tools are available and how they can be used.
• How e-mail works and the various parts of e-mail messages.
• How to use e-mail for effective communication in a professional setting.

Glossary of e-mail terms

Notes

There are many different kinds of communication tools. In an educational or professional environment the most important are collaboration support systems and e-mail.

Texting

Students and younger employees likely use text messaging (texting) for their daily communication. Text messages are brief and usually answered within a few minutes or hours. Because of the limitations of the message format, they are most suited for informal conversation with friends and family. However, texting from personal devices can sometimes be appropriate to alert colleagues to emerging situations such as arriving late for a meeting because of a train delay. Faculty members and managers are likely to prefer e-mail for all professional communication.

E-mail

E-mail is the standard communication tool in professional (academic, industry) life. Its advantages include permanence, searchability, non-invasive delivery, and the ability to compose messages of any length with as much care and consideration as are warranted by the situation. Just as you can send an informal birthday greeting to a friend or a formal request to the head of a company by postal mail, so you can send the same kind of content (with the same levels of formality) by e-mail.

The e-mail paradigm is very close to physical mail: a sender writes a message, a third-party mail delivery service (online rather than postal) delivers the message, and a recipient picks up the message and reads it. E-mail messages have several parts, some of which have names that correspond to the same parts of a postal message. Just as in postal mail, every message must specify the recipient's address (as is always written on the front of postal mail), the sender's address (as is often written in the corner or on the back of postal mail), some content containing the actual message (corresponding to the paper inside the postal envelope), and possibly one or more attachments (sometimes called enclosures in postal mail) which are separate documents sent along with the written message.

Headers and addresses

Every e-mail message contains a header which includes the date, the sender (From:) and recipient (To:) addresses, and the subject of the message. Messages can be delivered to more than one recipient by putting more than one address in the To: line. Messages can also be copied to other people using the Cc: and Bcc: fields. Replying to an e-mail message usually sends the reply to the sender (the From: address in the original message) although this can be changed by setting the Reply-to: field in the header.

E-mail addresses contain two parts separated by an @ symbol. The second part (after the @) is the domain name of the organisation that is responsible for receiving the message. The first part (before the @) is the local name of the person (or department) within that organisation who should receive the message. For example, mail to katsuma.yoshiyuki@kuas.ac.jp will be delivered to a particular organisation (KUAS) and within that organisation a particular person (Mr. Katsuma) will be able to retrieve and read the message. Similarly, e-mail sent to sales@honda.co.jp will be delivered to the sales department within the Honda Motor Company, Ltd.

Message content

Writing a professional letter on paper means following social conventions and business etiquette. Writing a professional e-mail means following “netiquette” (from Internet + etiquette). Many of the conventions of netiquette are related to making your e-mail easier for the recipient to read. To develop an intuition for netiquette, just ask two simple questions about every part of your e-mail message:

• What is the purpose of this word/sentence/paragraph (or other part) of the e-mail?
• How can I maximise its efficiency (make it shorter) and effectiveness (make it convey my message better)?

For example…

An e-mail message can be composed as if it were a postal letter to the same recipient. The same stock phrases, order of items, and levels of formality and politeness, can be carried over from paper letters to e-mails.

Replying

When replying to an e-mail, most mail software automatically inserts a copy of the original message in the reply. This is called quoting the original content. Typically each line of the quoted original is preceded with a > symbol to distinguish it from the reply. Replies can be divided into three styles, according to how this quoted material is used.

Efficiency and effectiveness are also important for replies. Top-posting accumulates lots of previous content in reverse order (compared to the chronological order of the conversation) and therefore creates more work for people joining the conversation later on. Bottom-posting accumulates lots of previous content at the top in correct chronological order, but this can force readers to scroll past a lot of history to reach the important part of the message. (The quoted content can be trimmed to minimise the amount of work the reader has to do.)

Inline replies avoid the disadvantages of both top- and bottom-posting. Inline replies are more efficient for the reader, help keep the total size of the message small, and produce better results when searching through e-mail messages for specific information or conversations.

While conducting an e-mail conversation, anything that is no longer needed can be removed, anything that is lacking can be added, and anything that is inefficient or ineffective can be modified.

Emoticons

Facial expressions and other body language are not available when communicating by e-mail. In less formal professional e-mails, the use of emoticons can help to indicate emotions that would accompany parts of a message delivered face-to-face. Some mail software will convert emoticons into graphical emoji for the reader.

emoticon	emoji	typical meaning
:-)		humor or happiness
:-(		sadness or unhappy
:-D		very large grin
:-) :-)		laughing
:-p		sticking out tongue (“so there!”, “I told you so!”)
;-)		winking
:-|		disgust
:-/		puzzled
:-o		surprised

Text effects popular with adolescent users, such as aLtErNaTiNg CaPiTaLs iN nOrMaL tExT are very difficult to read and therefore contradict the goal of maximising the effectiveness of communication. Similarly, writing in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS can be interpreted as shouting or yelling; alternatives such as using punctuation for virtual /italics/ or _underlining_ or *boldface* are much gentler on the reader.

Attachments

Documents that are separate from the main e-mail message but sent along with it are called attachments. Attachments are best kept small and limited in number.

Some mail delivery services will delete e-mails having large attachments, without warning or indication. Original photographs can be very large and are often down-sized before sending by e-mail. PDF files that use unnecessary text effects such as drop-shadow can also be very large. (A good solution to that problem is to avoid using unnecessary text effects in documents.)

Some mail services might also reject messages with too many attachments. Programs such as zip let you gather many files into to a single archive for attaching to an e-mail message.

Some mail software reformats message content. If layout such as

+--------------+-------------------+
| tabular      | data              |
+--------------+-------------------+
| written as   | mono-spaced text  |
+--------------+-------------------+

needs to be preserved then a plain text file containing the content can be sent as an attachment, to protect it against reformatting.

E-mail security

E-mail is inherently insecure. Messages are transmitted and stored without encryption, making them relatively easy to intercept and read. Secret information sent 'in private' by e-mail might easily become public knowledge. If sensitive information must be sent by e-mail, one way to protect it is to send it in a password-protected .zip archive.

Accidentally sending e-mail to the wrong recipient, or replying to everyone in a conversation instead of just the original sender, is a common mistake. One way to mitigate that problem is to leave the recipient fields blank and fill them in just before sending the message.

The sender of an e-mail has no control over who might read it. Negative comments made about a person in an e-mail could eventually be seen by that person, causing embarrassment (or even loss of job) for the sender. A recipient address might be mistyped, for example, or one of the intended recipients might decide to forward the message to the person mentioned in the negative comment.

E-mail safety

Cyber-criminals can use e-mail to compromise your computer or your personal information. This includes stealing your financial information to commit fraud. Messages received from unrecognised sender addresses might include attachments that introduce viruses to a computer when opened. Phishing messages are written so that they appear to be sent by a trusted person, such as a bank manager (asking for account details or password “confirmation”), or by an unknown sender seeking a collaboration with apparently huge benefits for the recipient. It is extremely unlikely that such messages are genuine.

A good way to increase the safety of e-mail is to install a spam (junk mail) filter to delete suspicious messages before they are presented for reading, and an anti-virus program that scans attachments for potential threats. Many online web mail services provide these functions for all their users' incoming e-mail. Some (such as gmail) go further by banning outgoing attachments that might contain harmful content.