Re in Email Subject Lines

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Whitney Evans from Dallas, Texas.

Hey, Whitney.

Hi, Whitney. What’s up?

How are you? So good to talk to you both.

We’re doing well. And you?

Good, good.

I had a question.

Knowing that you all receive thousands of emails, I’m sure ten times what I receive.

Oh, boy. Yes.

Right?

If you’ve noticed how people’s use of the subject line varies from a very short, concise subject line that does describe the body of the email to the vague just question.

And then secondly, the use of the R-E colon, which usually tells us that someone’s replying to an email we’ve sent, but I’ve seen some people using it just as their own regarding in the subject line.

Yes, this is a topic dear to my heart, and I’m surprised that in the 10 years I’ve been doing this show that have never ranted about bad subject lines.

I know.

I don’t pee very much, Whitney, but I come close on this topic.

Boy, do I.

Right.

So one of the things you said was when people who just put question in the subject line, we get a lot of those.

It doesn’t help.

It doesn’t help to find somebody’s mail or it doesn’t help to make sure that we read it next.

Like, it’s not enticing at all.

All the emails we get are questions are mostly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

It’s either going to be the word question or information.

Right.

Or I have a question.

We get that one a lot.

Yeah.

Or a quick question.

That’s my favorite one.

Oh, quick.

Yeah.

It’s a quick question.

None of them are quick.

Quick question followed by 2,000 words.

Right.

Oh, my gosh.

We’d love our email inbox.

It is one of the ways that we make the show.

We cannot do without it.

We have brilliant, interesting, funny people in the world who send us stuff all the time.

But if there’s one thing, I’m with you.

I just ask that the subject line just be a little more like a headline, just a little more descriptive of the content of the message.

Exactly.

You really have to develop A Way with Words to figure out how to condense your topic in the email to just a few words that someone could sort through their inbox and know, oh, I know what that’s about.

So, Martha, you sometimes do something, which I love in emails.

You send the whole body of the messages in the subject line, and then you put EOM.

Correct.

Do you do that?

Whitney? No, I haven’t done that. Yeah, we do that among ourselves here on the show. EOM standing for end of message so that they don’t even have to open it up.

But, you know, I’ve been thinking about that.

Sometimes you have to open it up anyway to reply.

So I don’t know. Right. Or it doesn’t really save us any time.

Or it doesn’t get marked red unless you open it, depending on the device or the software that you’re using.

Yeah. Right.

So, Whitney, do you have a lot of people writing to you with RE in their original email?

Not many. And I have thought about this ever since I called you that it seems like it’s a bit of an older generation that is using that for regarding.

So I’ll even think, oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t remember emailing you about our software upgrade.

But then I realized it’s not a reply to my email about software upgrade. It’s regarding which the email is about anyway, so why use it?

I’ve had that problem as well, where I’ve gone, where’s the original message? What are they replying to? Because I didn’t send it.

But what we have here is a collision of cultures.

The R-E, believe it or not, is not short for reply or regards or regarding.

It’s its own word from Latin.

And it’s a preposition that basically means regards or referring to or the thing, I think originally.

R-E-S.

Was it res or something like that?

Yeah, R-E-S.

Yeah, but re is a preposition.

It’s a preposition, yeah.

And I pronounce it re because of Latin.

There we go.

I’ve never said re.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, somebody said re in a meeting, and I thought, what?

Yeah, so people are super surprised.

This is probably the big revelation of this segment of the show.

RE is not an abbreviation.

That is a Latin word.

So it’s a lowercase e, then.

Is that right?

Yeah.

So what happens is the software manufacturer many years ago when they were making email, they misunderstood it.

And also because it so naturally can be an abbreviation for reply, they’ve thought of it that way.

And sometimes they’ve written it that way in manuals and books, and people have come to understand that.

But the previous generation, which I think I’m on the cusp of, that learned to type on a typewriter, my schooling straddled both the typewriter world and the computer world quite nicely.

So I got both traditions.

We learned re is something you would put on a letter to literally say, this is the subject of this letter.

Right.

Right?

So you put it at the top.

Right.

So a paper letter that you put in an envelope that’s done with a typewriter.

And so if you are getting re in the messages from older people, that’s why.

Because they probably learned it in the typing era.

And it just sounds so weird to me.

I was in that typing class too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, what an interesting connection to software developers and the use of the reply.

Whitney, you’re a delight.

Call us again sometime.

It was great to talk to you.

All right.

Take care now.

Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot.

Enjoy the show.

Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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