Decoding the Dear

Full article @ Medium

In the age of 140 characters tweets and wittier one liner status, writing a mail becomes difficult. For reasons unknown, we have evolved from the usual salutations of Dear and Respected to a more relaxed “Greetings”, “Hello” or simply “Hi.”

Mailing albeit has become obsolete in the world of Facebook, Whatsapp, Slack and other platforms which provide much more than sharing a text, memo, resume, articles or funny videos. In the early 2000s, writing a mail was one of the most interesting experience on the internet (And GTalk and Yahoo Messenger for the chatty kathy). Back then, it was regarded as a formal mode of communication and still remains one of the sacred medium of employee banter in the offices. But gradually with the advent of mailing ad-campaigns and the rise of S.P.A.M (Scams, Ponzi, Advertisement, Mailfraud)(Some Pretty Amazing Music is my personal favourite spam), the sacred mail became not so sacred and as good things come to an end, they were taken over by better productivity communication channels.

But on certain days when we need to approach someone formally for a job or share our lab practicals over with colleagues from different batches, the long forgotten mail comes to the rescue.

So what to do while adapting to the new age where the average attention span of a person is ruled by the finger sliding down the newsfeed, it becomes all more difficult to hold the person to your subject for the first line is not the actual mail body but the salutation.

Check out some ways which I found helpful in treading the fine line between the Good and the Bad (of course some outcomes have been ugly and resulted in the loss of a job opportunity, funding and a book deal) on my blog at Medium.