Edit your email

- At times I love or hate the convenience of having my inbox at my fingertips 24/7 but writing and editing on my phone isn't nearly as easy as it is on a larger screen. When I do send emails from my phone, I'm more likely to find typos in messages I've sent which is why I generally try to avoid it. On the one hand, minor typos may not be a big deal, but on the other hand they can signal that you're careless, lazy or don't pay attention to the details. And none of these are signals you want to be sending in a professional context. So avoid drafting emails on your phone. But what else? Here are three quick tips for editing your email, before you hit send. Autocorrect makes mistakes. Double check the spelling of names especially the recipient of your email. You start off on the wrong foot when your message says Dear Jamal, when it should have read. Dear Jamar, I've seen Autocorrect add an H to the name Sarah, and while some use H at the end of their name, not every Sara does. Another tip is to reread your message and do it aloud if you can. There are times when your spelling may be accurate but it's not quite the word you want to use. A colleague who teaches public speaking at a university in Europe told me her Dean sent her a very awkwardly worded email to let her know that her email signature listed her as a professor of public speaking but the L was missing in the word public. They both had a good laugh about it but the situation was pretty embarrassing. You also want to double check words with multiple spellings. Examples such as there and too come to mind. For example, in the sentence on the screen you can see a minor typo. This isn't something your spell check will necessarily pick up on, if you miss these little things in your emails what other details are you missing in your work? Maybe none. But you don't want people asking these types of questions about you. Remember, you have no control over where your message ultimately goes. So if you send a casual message with a few typos to a trusted colleague, but they forward the message to someone else, say because they have a question your original message might misrepresent you to someone you don't know so well. Let me leave you with one last tip, if you are going to send email from a tablet or phone, studies show, readers are more forgiving of errors and messages that contain the sent from my smartphone line in the signature.