You certainly are not alone in looking for tips for writing emails on your phone. In 2018, it is estimated that up to 80% of internet users conduct their email activities solely from a smartphone. Have you ever wondered why devices like iPhones provide an automatic ‘sent from my iPhone’ signature in their native email app? It’s because it is basically there to act as an apology to the recipient for all and any mistakes that might be present within the email! This is because, notoriously, structuring and writing out a full, important email on a smaller phone screen has been a really hard thing to do. You don’t quite get the full view and experience compared to desktop computers, and this can lead to unnoticed mistakes. With smartphone emailing soon to be the only way as statistics suggest, here are some tips for writing emails on your phone!
Before you lose track of your intentions, you should be putting all of the most important information right at the top of your email. You should assume that if you are sending on your phone, then people will be reading it on their phone, so optimize the text in such a way that you would find most appealing in, for example, a text message. Business up front, then extra details later in the email!
It can be easy to get carried away when you have predictive text to play around with, but make the effort to make your messages at straight forward and to the point as possible. You shouldn’t write a novel length email on your smartphone. That’s not fun to compose or to read, so be as concise as you can and clear on your language choices. Phone email isn’t the best environment for flowery words and metaphors!
Just because you have the ‘sent from my phone’ signature to hide behind, it doesn’t mean that you should ignore all of the traditional email etiquette. Respect people’s privacy with the BCC address masking, as well as making sure not to use Reply All when you are really only wanting to continue the message thread with one or a few people. Also, never assume that an email is private or confidential between you and the sender; it’s much harder to see these kinds of things on a smartphone.
If typing away on your small keyboard doesn’t appeal to you, you can always try out the dictation feature on your phone. Today’s modern smartphones have become very good at recording what you are saying and putting in into text form, complete with correct grammar and punctuation. However, it’s always best to read over voice-to-text translations, just in case!
In fact, it’s a good idea to proofread everything that you send over email on your phone, just to make sure that things like autocorrect haven’t changed important words and given your message an entirely new meaning! It’s much harder to notice errors as you go when typing on a phone, so get in to the habit of proofreading each message before sending it out!