No good ways to say goodbye
Why it’s time to give up on trying to choose the ‘right’ email sign-off
On any given day, odds are you send a fair number of emails.
In fact, if you’re the average person, you send about 120, just for work. Many of these messages are quick, but they can take time, concentration and, often, an attuned sense of digital etiquette. After you’ve expended all of those resources, you have on your hands a uniquely 21st century dilemma: how to sign off.
This, it must be said, is a trap. You want to show how fun or relaxed or professional you are, but the tools at your disposal are limited and blunt, and you have little control over how your choice will be perceived by the person on the other end of your message.
The email signoff is a tricky thing to parse because, while an email’s body text may communicate information, its closer ultimately sets the tone. Your “best” or “always” or “sincerely” is the shoulders upon which your entire email rests: pick a weak send-off and you may erase any sense of urgency or seriousness conveyed in the preceding paragraphs; pick one too strong and your message risks being overpowered. Danger is everywhere: “Sincerely” is outdated in its formality; “more later” is foreboding; and “cheers” is just utter nonsense because this is an email, not a pub, and you are a Canadian citizen.
The problem is no matter how good we get at digital communication, it’s still all but impossible to correctly convey tone. This is how “Best wishes” can go from an off-the-cuff salutation to a potential farewell, while a jovially intended “talk soon” can strike fear into the heart of even the most experienced corporate meeting-goer. This ambiguity has not gone unnoticed — pundits have weighed in via articles with headlines like “Your Email Sign-Off Says More About You Than You Think” (Esquire) and “89 Ways to Sign off an Email” (Forbes). But even the experts can’t agree on what makes for an unassailable sign-off. Where that Forbes story recommends “best” above all others, a recent Bloomberg article, compellingly headlined “Best Is Actually The Worst,” claimed that, of all the signoffs, “best” is to be avoided most stringently, calling it “charmless, pallid, impersonal” and “abrupt.” (The Guardian, for its part, disagreed so much with this assessment that it published a letter of rebuke the next day: best, it said, is simply efficient.)
The most recent addition to this fray is from Business Insider, which last month published a list of 29 common email signoffs, ranging from “Thanks” to “regards” to “Yours truly” to nothing at all, enlisting a cabal of digital correspondence experts to disseminate each one for its merits and pratfalls. “Respectfully,” they said, was a little stiff; “xo” is to be reserved for dear friends “and people with whom you are even more intimate.” There was no real consensus, except that “thanks” is best avoided, in most cases: “Fine if it’s for a favour the person has done, but obnoxious if it’s a command disguised as premature gratitude.”
Toronto business etiquette coach Linda Allan says the email sign off is an issue of formality. “It depends on how you know (the recipient) and whether there are several missives in a chain. People still use ‘sincerely,’ ‘yours truly,’ ‘yours very truly,’ ‘regards’ or ‘best regards’ or ‘warm regards’ or ‘personal regards.’ It sort of goes down a hierarchy from most formal. Again, it depends on the individual.”
The debate over how to close an email is a fair one, but for all that handwringing, there are no clear answers. Given the idiosyncratic nature of digital correspondence, there’s barely any sense is setting down ground rules for what we ought to use, and when.
So, email etiquette enthusiasts: there is no winning. This is one rule that will never be written. Go ahead, use whatever you’d like.
One way to avoid the problem is to skip the sign-off altogether. Nothing increases the likelihood that you’ll be misinterpreted quite like these tricky few words, so why not eliminate that risk by doing away with the email closer? It is a legitimate choice, though you may run the risk of appearing abrupt. Experts broadly agree that a sign-off is not necessary for each message in a chain — once at the beginning is sufficient — but caution against dropping it all together. But why not? What’s worse, being considered a little short, or appearing insincere? And who’s to say?
Two years before all this recent debate, Slate writer Matthew J.X. Malady advocated abandoning the sign-off, arguing they are holdovers from the days of written letters, and therefore obsolete. “At this stage of the game,” he wrote, “we should be able to interact with one another in ways that reflect the precise manner of communication being employed, rather than harkening back to old standbys popular during the age of the Pony Express.”
Our habits do seem to be evolving away from that Pony Express, with more email being sent via smartphone and tablet, which have different rules of etiquette from computer-based counterparts. The automated mobile signoff — “sent from my insert-device-here” — functions as a blanket request of forgiveness for brevity and spelling mistakes by indicating that an email has been sent on the go. The formality of a sign-off is unnecessary. As more of our communication moves toward smaller screens, it’s possible the urge to sign off properly willl also diminish.
And anyway, it’s not like the sign-off has always been a necessarily formality — or even a strict rule. In a 1952 letter to Harper & Row, the author E.B. White responded to a request from his publisher’s publicity department asking him to explain why he had written the children’s book Charlotte’s Web. In it, White explained his love for animals and how he came to admire spiders — but, he noted at the letter’s end, “I haven’t told why I wrote the book, but I haven’t told you why I sneeze, either. A book is a sneeze.” An unconventional closer, but not without the one thing one every letter, digital or otherwise, ought to include: White still signed his name.