Published: Monday, March 8, 2010 in The Whitworthian.

Sometimes, late at night, when I’m alone in my room and no one is looking, I lay my head on my desk and sob openly.

Occasionally this is because of some paper on Estonian photography that I forgot was due the next morning. More often, however, it’s because I made the mistake of opening a campus e-mail.

I’ll admit it–this has been talked about before. The layout and design train wreck that are a large percentage of campus e-mails have been the subject of several columns in this paper.

Some might say that well enough should be left alone. Some might say that dead horses are beaten enough in this fallen world.

On the other hand, some people said the moon was made of provolone. Just because some people say something doesn’t make it right, intelligent or nearly as awesome as anything that I say.

I will also admit that this issue has gotten better over the past few years. But every time I click open my inbox to be greeted by subject lines with six exclamation points and messages that contain text that looks like it was written by Roy G. Biv himself, I’m reminded that I still have work to do in this world.

So listen up, e-mail scribes. I’m about to give you a crash course in not causing copy editors to commit suicide.

E-mail has been around for a long time. The first e-mails were sent by cavemen, who worked in groups to pound chunks of iron into meaningful shapes, heat them up in fires and then stab mastodons with them in the hopes that the beast would take off running in the general direction of the recipient. While relatively effective, this method understandably limited the length of messages. Cavemen knew the value of keeping their words short and to the point.

Mastodons are slippery beasts, as everyone knows. Long messages meant more hot iron and higher chances the mastodon would just say “Screw this!” and trample the caveman into primordial soup. This, by the way, is the original meaning of the phrase “don’t kill the messenger.”

Another thing the cavemen did well was conservatism. I’m not referring to the fact that none of them voted for Obama–the point is that they were economical with their e-mails. After all, mastodons don’t just grow magically from cyberspace. A caveman couldn’t just write “SENIOR NIGHT” on the back of every mastodon around and let loose the horde. Everyone would hate him for using all the freaking mastodons. This method, known as a mastodon blast, was heavily discouraged in cave culture.

The use of color was also done tastefully by cavemen in general. It’s not because colors weren’t readily available in the cave world. Take a look at any book with dinosaurs in it, and you’ll see that most of them were bright green, purple and taupe. All a caveman had to do was run up and scrape some off real quick and slap it on his mastodon for the desired effect.

This rarely went over well with readers, however. The image of a rainbow-hued mastodon charging over the horizon toward your cave would be disturbing on several levels. Cavemen realized that just because dinosaurs were colorful didn’t mean their e-mails had to be colorful, too. Words to live by.

Finally, cavemen never wrote e-mails about dating. Because frankly nobody wants to hear about that rigmarole.

The point of all that is writing e-mails tastefully is so easy, even a caveman could do it.
Ha … I’m so punny.