A recent New York Times article suggests that signing off an email message with "Best" is an indication that a relationship is cooling down. Businessman Chad Troutwine claims that using "Best" to sign off is more like a brush-off:
Mr. Troutwine is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes "Best," then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from "Warmest regards" to "All the best" to a curt "Sincerely."
There's naturally been a lot of casual conversation about this article online, so we thought it would also be a natural topic for a Casual Friday. This week's study asks you to rate a variety of sign-offs. We'll try to see if the type of sign off readers prefer bears any relationship to their career, or other preferences they have. We've developed a special scale, which rates sign-offs from "overly effusive" -- too personal, too emotional -- to "overly brusque" -- too formal, too curt.
Click here to participate.
[Update 8/13/07: For some reason this old post is showing up on the Sb "most emailed" list. The study is closed, but you can see the results here.]
As usual, the study is brief, with just 6 questions, so it should only take a minute of your time. You have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, December 6 to participate -- or until we have 500 responses, whichever comes first. Then don't forget to come back next Friday for our analysis of the results!
Do you have any comments on this week's study? Any other emailing quirks the study failed to address? Let us know about them in the comments.
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The only problem I have with the survey is that having read the quote from Troutwine before I took the survey, I was 'primed' to interpret the "Best" signoff as a little brusque. My answers might have been different if I had taken the survey before having read any subjective statements from other people beforehand...
Christopher raises a good point!
I deal with a lot of European clients, particularly in Germany and the UK, and I've noticed that their favoured sign-off is "best regards". Or sometimes the German equivalent of that. ;)
Where is my favourite: "Cheers!"?!
Ah! That's right, there's one company in the UK who uniformly, to the last person, sign off with "cheers" for every single e-mail. (Well, except for the days when they don't like me. ;))
They have not, however, used "ta" with me yet.
I sign off all letters, whether electronic or otherwise with just my name. Thus:
Joshua Brader
Along with Christopher's point on the effectiveness of this study, I'd like to add that using words like "effusive" and "brusque" to define a spectrum is probably the most pompous thing I've ever seen in a survey.
Aside from the fact that most people haven't the slightest idea as to the meaning of those words (rendering the survey totally useless to them), the typical person who would understand this strata of speech would be a) someone with a doctorate in psychology, or b) a jeopardy contestant. That doesn't strike me as a very accurate cross-section of the email-equipped business world.
CWW:
Well, we are talking about CogDaily readers -- not exactly your average cross-section of society. These are people who read articles on pitch perception and face recognition for fun.
We thought "effusive" and "brusque" were kind of fun, for a "Casual Friday." But maybe that's just us...
I would hope any reasonably well-educated person who has read at least a few books in their lifetime would know the meanings of brusque and effusive. But maybe I'm just an optimist.
I wasn't quite sure what to answer in the survey for how many non-spam emails I send & receive in a day. I get many emails from online stores and such that I don't consider spam, and I also get automated emails at work from our source control system, bug tracking software, etc. But the number of individually hand-written emails I get is tiny compared to the non-spam, automated ones. But I figured since this is a survey about signatures, you were probably only interested in those.
Silliness.
The last thing that's needed is another example of over-interpreting what someone else says. Reacting in the ways suggested to a 2 or 3 word throwaway comment at the end of an e-mail is surely a pointless behaviour.
("Well, it may be pointless ... but don't call me 'Shirley' ...")
I found some of those sign offs 'weird'. Neither effusive nor brusque, just odd. For instance "yours truly" in either a business email seems overly formal which makes it strage. Similarly xoxoxox by anyone other than a 9 year old or spouse seems odd, even if the emails are personal emails.
you should have asked where people come from - the europeans may have very different conventions to the americans. For example, I think 'best wishes' is more friendly than 'regards' and I abbreviate to 'best' with colleagues who I count as friends. (I am English living in America).
I'm a 40-year-old IT worker for an international oil-related company in Texas, and I correspond with people around the world. "Best" is actually the "best" e-mail signoff (the one I like the best, that is), though I usually sign off with "thank you" if requesting something, or "Hope that helps" if providing tech support. Otherwise I have an automatic signature that puts my name on e-mails, which is good enough for the one-or-two sentence e-mails that I'd really rather IM if I had the capability.
It's no big deal really; I understand different users from different places have different ideas of respectful and not respectful, and anyway most of them are engineers trying to do their jobs instead of devoting time to hone their social skills.
I thought the personal category ought to have been broken down further into something like friend, close relative, lover/spouse. Some of those are downright weird coming from anyone you aren't romantically involved with.
My problem is basically that many of them are not effusive or brusque - just out of place. Specifically all those paper mail-era "Best", "Warmest regards" and so on for personal email, which to me is just plain inappropriate in communication with personal friends. I pretty much at random assigned those to "effusive" or "brusque".
I sign personal email with "/Janne" and business or not close personal stuff I don't sign at all, but just let the mail footer tell who I am and my contact information.
Back on the "Cheers" string . . . I can't stand it when it comes from an American. Cheers is a british way of saying "hello" or "goodbye" because the brits are too cool to say "hello" or "goodbye" (unless they're singing a beatles song). Anyway, when someone signs an email "Cheers", I assume that they are either british or learned english in a british school. If I find out they are American, they get a check in the box marked "douchebag" in my personal catalog of people I know.
I really couldn't care less how people sign their emails, so long as they don't write cheers.
Heh. Well said, RPM. I can offer that, as well as CogDaily's predominantly U.S. readership, as my reason for not including "cheers" in the list of possible sign-offs, but honestly, it was just an oversight.
for question #5, I assume the slash is supposed to mean "and", not "or"?
5. How many non-spam emails do you send / receive in a day?
I wasn't sure what to say about xoxoxo. It's both too friendly (effusive, I guess) and too easy (like the ones that could be considered brusque). And Sincerely sounds a bit wrong to me in any context, for reasons I can't quite explain.
Well, I am an American, but I learned my (British) English back in Europe and some habits die hard (as well as pronounciation of words like ant, bath...with a long 'ah'). So I keep using Cheers and nobody has taken offence so far. Perhaps they think it is a furriner's quirk - and they are right.
I tend to be literalist about my own sigoffs. Occasionally "Sincerely", but I often do without (full name, or "Dave H." according to formality). , or say something relevant to the letter context, such as "inquistively", "grumpily" (a complaint letter) or "awaiting your response". "Wishing you well" goes with a "support letter", which I write occasionally. To me, "xoxoxo" means "kisses and hugs", I wouldn't use it with anyone but a girlfriend/partner, or perhaps a female relative.
A couple of addenda after reading the coversation you linked to: If "Best" reads as brusque, it's probably because it abbreviates the signoff! If you want to convey the sentiment, you really should type a full phrase, such as "all the best" or "best regards". Come on, it's only a few more keystrokes! ;-)
That said, after 20+ years on the 'Net, I'm used to the "monotone" aspect of E-mail, so I habitually assume that subtle implications of wording are more likely than not to be spurious.
The appropriate sign-off depends more on the contents of the email than the nature of my relationship to the recipient.
I use "Cheers," as a sign-off for most informal emails, including some business-related correspondence and letters to friends and family. If I'm making an informal request for information or help, I'll usually sign off with "Thanks." If I'm writing a formal business letter, I'll sign off with "Sincerely" or "Yours truly."