Sunday, February 19, 2012

Signing-off

No, don't worry, I'm not signing-off blogging. (though my lack of blogging on a regular basis may have lead you to think this.) This blog post is about signing-off email.

In the States, typical professional and semi-professional email is generally signed-off as:

Thank you, Sincerely, and Thanks! (And if I know you well, to be followed by something silly like Heidi Hamburglar Hughes.)

Here in the UK, most of the email I recieve from colleagues ends:
With Regards, Best Wishes, All the Best, and Cheers.

Cheers seems to me to equal in tone and relationship as Thanks. I like it. I'll use it with people that I've exchanged more than one email with.

With Regards, Best Wishes and All the Best? The tone of these sound more like 'up yours'.

A recent email started with 'Hi Heidi' (which if I'm to understand correctly is a very American and overly friendly salutation) and ended with 'All the Best'. So are you telling me in a very friendly way to get bent?

Let me say, that if I can't figure out the tone and meaning of email sign-off, I'm a bit worried about spending two years trying to interpret UK employees in their daily work-place behavior.

1 comment:

Cara said...

ha ha! So glad you're now signing off of Blogging.

All the best
Cara


:)