Hi [your name here]!
It's been a long time since we last had a chance to catch up and I really hope you're doing well. Everything is great on my end [. . .]
I'm writing because I really need someone to help me out this week with a project and I was thinking you would be a great option with your experience in this subject [. . .]
I regularly have to edit in these sorts of "pleasantries" or "greetings" or "niceties" at the beginning and end of emails right before I hit send because I always forget them but don't want to sound like I don't care about the person I'm communicating with. I find this is generally more common in emails after a break in communication. The example above is a bit extreme but I often find myself wanting to add something more than simply the name of the person I'm addressing:
- Happy Monday, hope you had a great weekend!
- Good morning!
- Welcome back from your vacation! When you've had time to catch up . . .
- Thanks for your help!
Yesterday I had a chat with someone and they told me:
In email and other forms of digital communication it's becoming increasingly rude to include such niceties.
I know that email has become a pretty laid-back form of communication but is it now so laid back that I should cut to the chase, get to the point, kill the kindness?
Is there any evidence in the form of a sourced article that these niceties are going the way of the dodo?
I don't want anecdotal evidence for this. Everyone has their own writing style and preference. I want a study that supports either using or not using them. I've found email writing guides that make statements one way or another:
Brazen.com 2014
You wouldn’t walk into a friend’s house for dinner and bark out a command. The same is true for email. Niceties can go a long way.
Pleasantries aren’t dated constructs; they’re valuable warm-up phrases for effective communication. Start your messages warmly, comment on your recipients’ latest achievements and wish them well:
Hope all is well in your corner of the world! If Facebook’s telling me the scoop, it looks like you had an eventful month…
But this article by The Daily Beast in 2011 disagrees:
Niceties, Shmiceties: How E-mail Etiquette Could Be Holding You Back
I started with email, where I had often signed off with a chipper “thanks!” or apologized for inconveniencing someone with a request or for taking a while to reply. I was no longer sorry it took so long to get back to anyone. Neither did I feel either regretful about asking them to do something or grateful to them in advance for doing it.
I painstakingly reread every message to make sure neither polite phrase had sneaked through. And after I’d carefully excised each self-effacing slip, I hit send with a new set to my jaw, a hard glimmer in my eyes.
The effect was immediate: Colleagues began to treat me with more respect. Celebrity publicists—a notably power-aware lot whom I often contacted in my job—were more responsive. Even interns (those pecking-order experts) seemed to regard me with a new sort of awe.
Though, this article is one person's experience rather than a broader study and it's also specific to women.
For simplicity, let's say these are emails at work in the US. A study that includes gender in the consideration would be really useful.