Greetings! Email etiquette
Email etiquette is a minefield at the best of times. When it comes to the matter of punctuating email greetings, there are some major divides about what’s right and wrong.
TL;DRIt recently came to my attention that there’s a difference in how you use greetings when you’re emailing and writing a letter. At school, I’d always been taught to address the recipient with ‘Dear’ and place a comma after the greetings. In other words:
Dear Mom,
Something that stuck out to me when I started working was that this comma is omitted in emails and most writers just say ‘Hi’. Like so:
Hi Janet
Using Dear or placing a comma after the greeting can actually seem quite jarring when included in electronic mail.
Knowing that what we’re taught at school can change – and having a letter I’d asked to be proofread returned without the punctuation following the greeting – got me wondering whether there are any concrete rules. And here we are.
This is a relatively complicated topic, because what is accepted isn’t technically grammatically correct. The basic rule is this: letters should be addressed using ‘Dear’ and a comma after the greeting, while emails use ‘Hi’ in the greetings and don’t get any punctuation.
To the letter
Let’s start with letters, seeing as they’re simpler.
Unless you don’t know who you’re writing to, use ‘Dear’ as the greeting, followed by a comma. Here, “Dear” functions as an adjective, so there’s no need for punctuation between it and the name.
Dear Mom,
Hope you’re enjoying your week …
If on the off chance you’re writing a letter to someone whose name you don’t know, address it using ‘To Whom It May Concern:’. The first letter of each word is always capitalised and the greeting is always followed by a colon. In fact, the colon is the preferred punctuation mark in all formal communications. That’s straightforward enough.
To Whom It May Concern:
I write to you in application …
Disruptive technology
Email is quite different from traditional letters. And a bit more complicated.
If you know the recipient, a simple ‘Hi’ followed by their first name is perfectly acceptable. If you don’t know the recipient and they’re a peer (have a similar or lower rank than you), ‘Hi’ is still perfectly fine. I would steer away from this if you don’t know their first name, though, as ‘Hi Mrs X’ can sound a bit awkward.
Here’s where it gets a bit murky. If you’re using ‘Hi’ as your greeting, you’re using an interjection. Interjections need to be followed by punctuation – usually an exclamation or, where they’re part of a sentence, a comma. And because the greeting is a sentence, it needs a full stop at the end. Which means it would look like this:
Hi, Dan.
Although this is grammatically correct, it is quite jarring considering the email greetings we’re used to.
It’s widely accepted that the comma between the greeting and the recipient’s name should be dropped. Many people would even find a comma placed after the recipient’s name odd. However, it’s not altogether incorrect, so you can choose which you prefer.
Hi Jane
Hi Jane,
As with letters, the punctuation you use is very much dependent on the situation. If you’re writing to someone you don’t know to request something, it’s likely that you would use the most formal greeting, which is ‘Dear’ followed by a colon, until such time as they use a different format to address you.
Dear Mrs Logan:
TL;DR
While there is a grammatical rule prescribing how written greetings should look, it’s been gently eroded over time. These are the fast (but not hard) rules:
- The recipient’s name in informal letters and formal emails follows “Dear” and the whole greeting ends with a comma.
- Formal letters and emails will both use “Dear” and have a colon after the recipient’s name
- Greetings in informal emails start with “Hi” and don’t have any punctuation.
