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Email is by far the easiest way to communicate with people. But, it is also, by far, the most shallow way to communicate with people. When communicating through Email, people miss the body language and tone of your voice. This can lead to many misunderstandings, and pointless bickering over a simple joke that would have been picked up in a face-to-face conversation.

These are seven horrible habits than can kill your Email conversation, and how you can fix them to avoid stupid arguments or worse:

1) Hanging Questions

Any and every Email that is a request or question must have an answer, this is the same in face-to-face conversations. The person won’t know that your listening unless you respond to them in some way. So Email the person back, even if your response is a simple “OK.” Really, how long could that take? If you don’t have time to think about your response, tell them right away. You could say “Hey, I don’t have time to really think this through right now. I’ll get back to you later.” Or something to that effect.

2) Buried Requests

Burying a request is when a question is stuffed in the middle of a paragraph of text. If you reiterate your question in a separate paragraph after your main paragraph, the reader will be sure to notice it.

3) Wrong Medium

I hate sitting at my computer desk Emailing someone back and forth for an hour, it wasn’t meant for conversations like that. I refuse to do it, its pointlessly slow. Ask someone to have an in-person conversation, or if in-person can’t be done, try Skype, or if that doesn’t work out either, go with MSN Messenger.

4) Sarcasm

Sarcasm hardly works in Emails, so don’t use it. You might tick someone off, and then you’ll be in trouble, and chances are you won’t know why.

5) Sending Urgent Requests Through E-Mail

I only check my Email 5 times a day. I write all my Emails at one time during the day, this is whenever I can fit the time in. So, what if someone expects an answer within the day. Well, they’ll be disappointed. Its not like they could blame me though, you can’t expect an answer within less than 5 days, so keep that in mind when Emailing someone. Call them if it is urgent, if you are not able to call that person, be sure to give them as much notice as possible when sending a request.

6) Lengthy Paragraphs

No one reads on the the internet anymore, they scan and skim. You probably shouldn’t write eight sentence paragraphs, keep them to five lines at most. If you have important imformation, make sure it stands out from the rest of the text. Maybe put it in boldface, or put it on a separate line. Utilize lists, bulleted, or numbered, it doesn’t matter.

7) E-Mail Tag

Email isn’t meant for immediate responses. Its sort of a “Well, when you get a round to reading this” kinda thing. Of course, I’m talking about personal Email, work is completely different. But, for personal Email, you should have set times that you check your inbox, and not leave it open all day, waiting for your next Email. It will cause distractions and disruptions from what you are doing. Trust me, I have a major problem with this.