A Little Electronic Dawn

James Francken

• The Reasons I Won't Be Coming by Elliot Perlman
  Faber, 314 pp, £9.99, July 2000, ISBN 0 571 19699 3
• Turn of the Century by Kurt Anderson
  Headline, 819 pp, £7.99, February 2000, ISBN 0 7472 6800 2
• Slab Rat by Ted Heller
  Abacus, 332 pp, £10.99, March 2000, ISBN 0 349 11264 9

William Strunk was a standard-bearer for the use of bold, brief English. In The Elements of Style, first published in 1918, the Cornell professor set out his rules of usage and principles of composition in the form of direct commands – ‘Sergeant Strunk snapping orders to his platoon’. ‘Omit needless words.’ ‘Do not affect a breezy manner.’ But ‘times change, and so do written communications’; a new style handbook has been published that intends to retire Strunk from service. The Elements of E-mail Style insists that in a world of electronic messages, methods of writing and editing that take ‘hours or days’ are outdated. An e-mail should have an impromptu feel and the handbook suggests how to create this effect: sentences can be truncated, for example, and capital letters ignored. A reply to an e-mail can arrive within minutes, so the tone of a message should be conversational: in an informal e-mail, a stiff greeting or stilted closing is out of place. The Elements of E-mail Style gives the reader advice on good ‘netiquette’ – the conventions for messages sent via the Internet – and explains how to have better high-tech chit-chat.