It's not just WHAT you say but HOW and WHERE you say it: Netiquette



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While NETiquette IS just common-sense courtesy, it is amazing how many people seem to forget their manners when they go online. Therefore, a review of the core rules as outlined by Virginia Shea almost twenty years ago is a good place to start your review. For some reason, people find it easier to be less than polite when they are on the Internet, which is why Rules 1 and 2 are so important.

A great resource that covers all the major Internet forms of communication is NetworkEtiquette.net.

Even though it doesn’t cost anything to send an email, to make a blog post, or to post a comment on a discussion group, you should avoid ‘spamming’ (sending or forwarding electronic junk mail or unsolicited or commercial messages).  It is so easy to hit the ‘reply’ icon – but, when replying to a message sent through a listserv’s mailing list, you might be sending a rather personal message to all the readers who were addressed in the original mailing. And, since emails are so easily ‘sharable,’ you should think long and hard about sending one that could end up ‘biting you in the …’ “Never put in a mail message anything you would not put on a postcard.” (Hambridge, 2);

Additional email DOs include: having a meaningful subject line; KISS (Keep It Short and Simple); don't SHOUT (avoid typing in all CAPS); don't 'flame'; and spellcheck before hitting that 'send' button. Many people have corporate email addresses. Emails sent and received through these accounts should be professional and/or business-related. (While you can delete messages you send and receive, these may, indeed, be archived on the company's server for legal reasons. Therefore, they might exist elsewhere, even though they no longer exist in your email folders.) More personal communications should come from your personal email account.

With LMS software being so ubiquitous, many schools also have devised netiquette rules for those systems!

http://bit.ly/4cVt4E

Works Consulted

Hambridge, S. "Netiquette Guidelines (Request For Comments: 1855)." Internet Engineering Task Force. Network Working Group, Oct. 1995. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. <http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc1855.pdf>.

Pankoke-Babatz, Uta, and Phillip Jeffrey. "Documented Norms And Conventions On The Internet." International Journal Of Human-Computer Interaction 14.2 (2002): 219-235. Academic Search Elite. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.

Preece, Jenny. "ETIQUETTE ONLINE: From NICE To NECESSARY." Communications Of The ACM 47.4 (2004): 56-61. Business Source Premier. Web. 20 Nov. 2012.

Network Etiquette.net. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Nov. 2012. <http://networketiquette.net/>.

Shea, Virginia. NETiquette. Albion.com, 1994?. Web. 9 Nov. 2012. <http://www.albion.com/netiquette/>.