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I’m doing some research this morning on Amazon.com about books having to do with email style and other types of electronic writing. I came across one book, Lisa Smith’s Business E-Mail: How to Make It Professional and Effective, which may or may not be a good book, I don’t know. But let me quote in its entirety the first customer review:

To tell you the truth, I haven’t read this book. But I thought this would be a convenient place to make fun of this guy in my office who sends out these ridiculously over-worded, multi-page e-mails with the delineated paragraphs and varying fonts to communicate an idea that a normal person could convey in less than 20 words. I get about 7 or 8 messages from him every day, giving me a “project status update” or whatever, whenever he hears something from someone, no matter how trivial or how unrelated it is to my role in the project.

I trust Ms Smith has addressed this problem in her book, and I highly recommend the book to anyone who sends out annoying, unnecessary e-mails to their co-workers all day long.

Ms. Smith must be mightily pleased with that…