Elements of E-style.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 16-APR-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

E-mail isn't the most self-conscious medium; haste and volume encourage many correspondents to forget themselves. Still, everyone settles on a style. The lower-case non-punctuators, the serial capitalizers, the rhetorical questioners, the subpoena-anticipators, the posterity-watchers: they all have their reasons, and their conceits.

Two years ago, David Shipley, the Op-Ed editor of the Times, and Will Schwalbe, the editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books, were eating oysters in Grand Central Terminal and complaining about ill-considered e-mails they had recently received, and even sent. Before long, they found themselves cobbling together a system of proper usage and protocol. Now, with the publication of their book "Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home," they have...

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