Designing Email Messages for Corporate Readers: A Case Study of Effective and Ineffective Rhetorical Strategies at a 100 Company - Individual

This article by Sam H. Dekay focuses on a study done by a Fortune-100 Company to evaluate the importance of document design on emails. The author presents some statistical facts about how much email is used in a corporate environment. He also writes about the opinion of researchers and academics on the email as a communication tool and how they describe it as a “merely homogeneous mixture of black type embedded in a white background” and how email communications is at present “exiled to a design wasteland”. The article’s expected result is to dispute these comments and to prove how email is a robust communication tool in the workplace and it deserves study by rhetoricians and document designers. The study used email messages sent twice a month and delivered to approximately 23,000 employees concerning the most effective strategies for computer security. Two different styles were used to deliver these messages: the first style used lots of color, fonts and clip in order to avoid the resemblance to a memorandum-style email. The second design avoided the clip arts and presented the content as black letters in a white background. The second design was considered more effective based on the recipient's’ responses which increased 10 times from the first design to the second. These responses are mainly attributed to the unacceptable elements of the corporate environment conventions in the first design such as colors and clip arts and the addition of To: and Subject: field in the second design to avoid confusion and increase confidence in the readers. As a conclusion the author makes a call for document designers and rhetoricians to analyze emails as a form of communication that incorporates design features to get the results needed