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Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home | 
| Authors: David Shipley, Will Schwalbe
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $13.57
You Save: $6.38 (32%)
Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 172723
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 247
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.2 x 5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0307263649
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.054692
EAN: 9780307263643
Publication Date: April 10, 2007
Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
An April 2007 Significant 7 Editors' Pick: Funny, engaging, and oh-so-practical, Send is the ultimate etiquette handbook for email, making David Shipley and Will Schwalbe the "Miss Manners" resource for the digital age. Full of practical insights, Send is an invaluable resource for anyone who uses email, and is guaranteed to help you "think before you click." We are not the only fans of this important book. We asked psychologist, science journalist, and bestselling author Daniel Goleman to read Send and give us his take. Check out his exclusive guest review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Daniel Goleman
 Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses, and is the author of many bestselling books, including Emotional Intelligence and most recently, Social Intelligence.
Poor Michael Brown. During the darkest days of the Hurricane Katrina debacle, Brown, then director of FEMA, the agency that so badly bungled the rescue efforts, sent this email: "Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?"
Emails can come back to haunt us--any of us. Few among us have mastered this medium, and only slowly are we realizing its dangers.
From the earliest days of email people "flamed", sending off irritating or otherwise annoying messages. One explanation for the failure to inhibit our more unruly impulses online is a mismatch between the screen we stare at as we email, and the cues the social circuits of the brain use to navigate us through an interaction effectively: on email there is no tone of voice, no facial expression. When we talk to someone on the phone or face-to-face these circuits would ordinarily squelch impulses that will seem "off." Lacking these crucial cues, flaming occurs.
It's not just flaming--I've sent my fair share of emails that were, in retrospect, embarrassing, too familiar or formal, or otherwise wrong in tone. Email invites these lapses in social intelligence in part because the social brain flies blind. In the absence of the other person's real-time emotional signals we need to take a moment to shift from focusing on our own feelings and thoughts, and intentionally focus on the other person, even in absentia, and consider, How might this message come across?
The peril of being off-key is amplified by the temptation to hit SEND prematurely: before we've thought it over and had a chance to ease up on that too-stiff tone, drop that bit of sarcasm, and remember to ask about the kids.
In the old days of letter writing--a dying art--we had plenty of time to rewrite before sealing the envelope, and so flaming letters were far more rare than red-hot emails. And so the brave new world of email could benefit from a civilizing force, a voice that articulates the ground rules online.
Enter Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, a new book by David Shipley (an old friend of mine) and Will Schwalbe. Send not only articulates the way to win--or keep--friends online, but offers practical tips on both email etiquette and on the writing style most suitable.
In this witty and wise book Shipley and Schwalbe give essential guidance on vital matters like the politics of using Cc (nobody likes to be left out); when to just reply and when to "Reply All"; the danger of the URGENT subject (too many and you cry wolf); fine-tuning your greetings to fit the relationship (if you use the wrong one, you can lose them at hello); how best to apologize online (put the word 'sorry' in the subject or else the email may never be read).
But Send is far more than Miss Manners for the Web; it's brimming with fascinating insights. For example, now that email has become the way we talk, showing up in person has added impact as the ultimate compliment, signifying that the person, meeting or project has special importance for you.
Years ago a slim volume by Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, laid out the ground rules for good writing; the book became a bible for authors, widely known just as "Strunk and White." Send should make Shipley and Schwalbe the "Strunk and White" for the Web. --Daniel Goleman (www.danielgoleman.info)
Product Description
When should you email, and when should you call, fax, or just show up?
What is the crucial—and most often overlooked—line in an email?
What is the best strategy when you send (in anger or error) a potentially career-ending electronic bombshell?
Enter Send. Whether you email just a little or never stop, use a desktop or a handheld, here, at last, is an authoritative and delightful book that shows how to write the perfect email—at work, at school, or anywhere. Send also points out the numerous (but not always obvious) times when email can be the worst option and might land you in hot water (or even jail!).
The secret is, of course, to think before you click. Send is nothing short of a survival guide for the digital age—wise, brimming with good humor, and filled with helpful lessons from the authors’ own email experiences (and mistakes). In short: absolutely e-ssential.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 41 more reviews...
 Even Bowser the dog could read this! April 23, 2007
111 out of 157 found this review helpful
I could not believe how elementary, basic and useless this book is. The only people I can think of that could make any use of this book at all are folks who do not have any etiquette skills and barely know what an email is. This book makes such earth shattering suggestions as not to write threatening emails or emails about insider information. Wow, there's something I'm glad I read about. Also, A large section of the book is spent explaining what the difference between CC: and To: is. Long discussions ensue on explaining both CC: and To:. I bought this book expecting a wealth of material on emailing for the average person and have instead found not one paragraph of useful information. For the first time I am returning a book to Amazon. Dreadful, absolutely dreadful. Even sixth graders are too advanced for this book's contents. I sorely wish I could give less than one star- this book has my complete disdain.
 I loved SEND, from Start to End April 18, 2007
45 out of 67 found this review helpful
SEND isn't just readable, it's funny and charming and wildly useful. We all email too much and too often, and at last, here's a book that tells us how to do it better. The authors caution against endless cc'ing and Re: ing but are realistic too. They recognize that some emails are for the sole purpose of sustaining relationships and that even emoticons have their place. :-) What's important is consistency, thinking before you send, and sending the kind of email you'd like to receive. This is a book not just for businesspeople and college grads, but for all of us.
Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home April 12, 2007
37 out of 45 found this review helpful
"Send" is smart, timely, entertaining, a good investment -- and, as a reference book, a keeper. It combines the pithy good sense of Strunk & White's "Elements of Style" with the tongue-in-cheek humor of H. W. Fowler's "Modern English Usage" to produce the equivalent of Amy Vanderbilt's "Etiquette" for the e-set.
While most of us take emailing for granted (and, unfortunately, never -- or only rarely -- think about how our message might be received at the other end), David Shipley and Will Schwalbe take us behind the electronic curtain to show us that digital yellow-brick roads might well conceal oodles of anti-personnel devices, most of them of our own unconscious design.
"All ye who enter here..." might do well to stand at the portal to the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, there's no such warning. And so, all of us -- too glibly, too happily, too unreflectively -- bound through without first taking the time to learn some basic do's and don't's.
Shipley and Schwalbe have compiled such a list -- and have provided anecdotes and illustrations aplenty to make digesting that list an eminently enjoyable undertaking. If, for example, you should ever experience "a sudden chill in the ether," you need only turn to page 131 to discover a possible source of the temperature drop between you and your pretended e-pal(s).
While "Five Words That Almost Everyone Misuses" (p. 121) certainly wasn't necessary to any reader who's spent a pleasantly sardonic afternoon with Mr. or Mrs. Malaprop, "This Is Annoying How" is the kind of literary circus act that leaves us gasping with delight.
If you're one of those readers who enjoyed Lynn Truss's "Eats(,) Shoots & Leaves" -- not only for its usefulness, but also for its moxy -- "Send" is your kind of book. If you're NOT that kind of reader, buy it anyway -- it may save (you) a friend.
 Quick Review of Send May 1, 2007
32 out of 37 found this review helpful
Here's a book that has been climbing up the bestseller charts the past week or so--Send: the Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by David Shipley and Will Schwable.
Guy Kawasaki called the book "the Elements of Style" of email. I don't believe I'd go that far. It isn't exactly a reference you can pick up again and again. There is some how-to, but don't expect to learn how to manage your email or how to use an email program. Once you read the book through, you are done. I am impressed with their blurbage on the book--Bill Bryson says, "This is just the book I've been waiting for."
There is some good information here about when to send email (and when to phone), how to write an email, the pitfalls of emotion in email, and how to avoid legal trouble. But as an experienced email user, I didn't learn anything new in the book--except that maybe I'm guilty of being a little casual in my communications. Hey! Hey! Hey! That's who I am. :-) :-) :-) :-P
A commonplace guide. April 20, 2007
27 out of 34 found this review helpful
Send is nothing but a commonplace guide on email that the marketing gurus had the audacity to compare to the "Elements of Style."
Each chapter is filled with obvious information on email: for example, "The Seven Big Reasons to Love Email" and "The Eight Reasons You May not Want to Email" are basic, skillfully written blogs of what we already know. Another chapter dedicates 24 pages to the difference between "To" and "CC": again, more information that we know. The most mind boggling chapter is titled, "How to Write [the Perfect] Email": a title that is undeniably deceitful. This fruitless chapter uses the poor writing style of a preteen as an example. To add insult to injury, the quick overviews on why to incorporate grammar and punctuation, as well as avoid capital letters and odd fonts is so 90s.
Reviewing this book any further is a waste of valuable time and effort.
Congratulations Messrs. Shipley and Schwalbe for formatting a simple editorial into a $19.95 book.
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