Introduction to Memos and Emails

If you like movies, especially ones set in historical periods, you might enjoy finding anachronisms, or things in the wrong time period. You might see something from the present, such as a mobile phone, that is not supposed to be in a movie set in the past, such as 1850.

For example, a well-known anachronism is in the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the movie, we see a plane flying over a map to show us Indy's route to adventure in Nepal. But while the movie was set in the 1930s, the map is from the 1980s. For example, viewers see the plane fly over Thailand, but the country was called Siam until 1939.

Maybe no one has ever confused the writing of an email or memo with an action movie. But if you enjoy finding anachronisms, there are a few hiding out in your everyday email form. It has anachronisms embedded in it from the old days before computers. Can you think of any right now? As we cover the basics of email and memos, I'll point out a few—let's see if I can tell you about any that you might not know about.

If you have ever written an email, you may have noticed that you have to provide the name of the person you are sending the email to and the subject. The email automatically provides the name of the sender and the date.

Email formats are based on memo formats—that is, they are set up to provide the four key pieces of introductory information that a memo states in the heading: to, from, subject, and date.

Memos and emails have the to, from, subject, date heading format in common. For this reason, emails are often considered to be synonymous with memos. Also, much of the information that is shared via email is the information categorized into types of memos, for example, meeting minutes, lab reports, progress reports, directives, and other types of business and professional correspondence.

In fact, the main difference, if one is said to exist, between emails and memos, is that non-email memos exist on paper. The key format difference, then, is the signature.

That's right—it is common in email for persons to "sign" the email like a letter. In an informal email, the person might just sign his or her first name. In a more formal email, the person might have a closing like in a letter—"Sincerely," for example, along with his or her full name and title. In this way, emails can be more like letters.

Paper memos NEVER have a closing and signature. Instead, the writer would indicate that he or she really wrote the memo by initialing by his or her name in the paper heading using blue or black ink. Historically, memos were typed up by stenographers and taken back to a boss for approval. Thus, the stenos would put their lower-case initials after a backslash at page bottom, like so:

However, since people write their own messages on their own computers, the /ab now indicates authorship as long as they match the From line.

Of course, in email, the reader feels pretty confident that the email really came from the sender because, presumably, the sender had to log in to a secure email account.

If you take a look at your email when you are about to send one, you will notice some other options you have that are related to the olden days of memo writing and letter writing. You have the options of cc. CC stands for carbon copy. You may not be old enough to remember that before copy machines and computers that could print off multiple copies of a document, people used carbon paper to make copies. When a person would write or type, he or she would slip a piece of carbon paper underneath the document, and the striking of the pen or typewriter key would make a duplicate mark on a second piece of paper underneath the carbon paper, hence the term carbon copy. So the "cc" in the email heading stands for carbon copy, even though we don't use carbon anymore. In fact, sometimes, the cc is just changed to c for copy.

When do you use the cc option? When you want someone to have a copy of the email, but only for reference purposes. Or to put it more casually, to keep someone in the loop. For example, you manage a team, and you recently had a meeting. You send the meeting minutes to the team members who attended the meeting. You also want your supervisor to know that 1) you had a meeting and 2) you covered important topics and some decisions are made. Your supervisor isn't necessarily going to respond to the email and isn't directly involved in the meeting or projects. This is a good time to use a cc. When you cc someone on the email, everyone who gets the email can see who is cc-ed.

Your email has a bcc or bc option. Bcc stands for blind carbon copy, and bc is blind copy, but they are the same thing. When you use the bc option, only the person bc-ed can see who gets the email. The person in the "to" box or anyone cc-ed cannot see that a bc copy was sent or who received it. Some people consider the bc option to be unethical. Persons who disagree say that it is appropriate to use the bc option when emailing a subordinate about a difficult matter—a disagreement regarding policy, for example—and you want to make sure your supervisor knows what you wrote. You would bc your supervisor. You don't want your subordinate to think you are "tattling" on him or her, but you do want your supervisor to know what you did in case the matter ends up in his or her office, he or she is not caught unawares.

People generally agree that using the bc option is appropriate for privacy reasons. For example, perhaps you are an attorney, and you email an insurance company a copy of a client's claim. You might bc the client to ensure the client knows you sent the document and to keep his or her email address private from the insurance company. The insurance company likely assumes that the client will get a copy of the claim, or already has one. In another example, as a professor, I might send out an email to my entire class but bc all the students to keep their emails private from each other. With the bc, every student will receive the email, but each student can only see my name as the sender. Or, you might use bc for courtesy. For example, perhaps you have received an email with the hundreds of email addresses that were cc-ed on the original email, and you have to scroll through them to get to the message. It's annoying. If it's not necessary for the recipients to know who received the email—maybe it's just a reminder that the office is closing early today--and you want to avoid the scroll through the cc's, then you can bc all the recipients. That way, there's no cc scroll, and when someone replies, there's no chance that he or she will accidentally hit "reply all."

Something you may not know about is the "through" or "via" line on paper memos. In the military or in especially hierarchical companies, it may be frowned upon for a person to send an email to someone at a level above his or her direct supervisor. At such organizations, any correspondence to a person above the writer's direct supervisor must go through the supervisor. The memo must go first to the direct supervisor, indicated with a "through" or "via" line. The direct supervisor initials by his or her name to show he or she has read and approved the memo, and then sends it to the next level until it arrives at its destination. When the final recipient receives it, he or she is assured that your memo has been read and approved all the way up the chain of command.

In an email-only culture, this same process would be achieved by sending the email to your direct supervisor and allowing him or her to forward the email up the chain of command.

Regardless of how hierarchical you believe your organization to be, it is not generally a good practice to send correspondence—paper or electronic—to persons at levels above your supervisor without talking to your supervisor about the matter first and perhaps asking him or her to unofficially review and approve your memo or email.

Finally, in the days of paper, memos also indicated attachments. If a memo arrived on a desk with the notation "Attachment" it meant that there was supposed to be something paper clipped to the memo with additional information. And the recipient saw nothing paper clipped, something was missing. It is for this reason that you often see in an email a paper clip icon for the attachment button or notification. And because enclosures/attachments are often indicated by paper clip symbols in an email feed, the "Attachment" note is not used in emails.

Do you want readers to respect your writing, read it with ease, and come away with a clear sense of what you intended to communicate and a positive impression of you as a co-worker or team member?

If so, knowing the memo format and a bit of the reason why memos look as they do will help you in structuring your memo/email properly. As we move through this lesson, you will learn more about what types of content go in the main types of emails/memos, and how to write clearly and effectively.

One last thing. As you can see, memos and emails are not exactly the same thing. But memos evolved into emails, although paper memos are still created, and often then scanned and distributed electronically. In this chapter, we will usually refer to emails and memos as the same thing, and then clarify if we are referring to one or the other specifically.