This is an excellent example of why inferring causation from an observed correlation requires great care. Note that the study did not randomly assign valedictions to emails and observe the causal impact on response rate. Rather, they observed a correlation between the sign-off chosen and the response rate.
"Thanks" garners many responses because people use it in emails that make reasonable requests with a good chance of response.
My favorite valediction is still "I am, &c.," which is short for "I am your humble and obedient servant". Not sure whether my colleagues appreciate it as much as I do...
"&c" is the archaic form of "etc", the ampersand being a ligature of "et" - Latin for "and".
As far as I can tell the "&c." version was popularized by the 1944 novel "Anna and the King of Siam".
So it literally means "I am, etc.", which I assume only expands to "I am your humble and obedient servant" in a humorous way. Might be taken the wrong way.
&c was widely (exclusively?) used in the 18th century. I happen to have been looking at this newspaper ad most recently: https://i.imgur.com/ALe5XeT.jpg
The inference is that the second book (Airs &c &c) will also be of Airs, Minuets, Gavotts, and Reels (or something similar).
Also, 18th-century letters routinely end with some snowclone of "your most humble and obedient servant", with many writers eliding some or all of it with &c since it was understood.
Amusingly "ampersand" is derived from the time when it was the 27th letter of the alphabet just known as "and", one would recite the alphabet as "..., x, y, z, and, per se, and", contracted to ampersand.
>"&c" is the archaic form of "etc", the ampersand being a ligature of "et" - Latin for "and".
"etc" is an abbreviation for and contraction of "et cetera", Latin for "and so on". "&c" is, I think, an artifact of a particular time in history when writing skills were spreading rapidly but the process of writing itself was cumbersome and time consuming, necessitating macro-type abbreviations like that. It's not particularly archaic.
It is Latin shorthand created by Cicero’s educated slave, Tiro. The system was created to record senate meetings and conversations for Cicero to go over later.
I am from the UK and work with a lot of Americans. I often sign off emails with "Cheers," which gets a lot of positive comment.
As well as being what you might say when clinking glasses, in the UK "cheers" is a jovial way of saying "thanks" as well as something you might say for "goodbye" so works in all these contexts simultaneously.
I've been doing Cheers for a long time too. Nice to see it towards the top. I prefer a more casual friendly tone and I'm pretty sure I started using it after seeing someone from the UK sign off all emails like that.
Yep, Brit here in the US too, and 'Cheers' is my sign-off-of-choice. I'm told that I only get away with it because I'm British though, and my American colleagues would feel awkward using it :)
I have a similarly positive experience with "Cheers". I always like it when someone uses it, and I often use it myself. Works really well with people you already established a connection with.
The Italian word "ciao" [0] comes from the word "slave", meaning exactly that - "I am your humble servant". Became popular in Venice and then spread elsewhere.
I'm born and raised in Italy and TIL. Makes sense, ciao -> sciao -> schiavo (slave).
BTW, interesting fact: "The Venetian word for "slave", s-ciào [ˈstʃao] or s-ciàvo, derives from Medieval Latin sclavus, a loanword from Medieval Greek Σκλάβος, related to the ethnic "Slavic", since most of the slaves came from the Balkans."
I'll be extremely sad if one day we'd have to lose the most common salutation because somebody deemed it offensive.
In the Royal Navy, written letters to the captain [1] have to be signed off with "I am honoured to be, Sir, your obedient servant". I remember (in 2010) people thought this was stupid and instead used something like "Yours sincerely". But this ran contrary to regulations, and it was announced that letters would be rejected if not signed properly. Time moves very slowly in the RN.
[1] There are codified degrees of formality for written communications. Formal, demi-formal, and others used more operationally. I am talking about first-tier formal letters to senior officers in this case.
I had someone tell me on the phone and email - "I kiss the ground you walk on". I thought it was just weird and it caught me off guard on the phone the first time.
Candidly - your colleagues most likely don't appreciate it as you do, whether they know the meaning or not.
As I'm sure you're aware, in some countries, servitude is the greatest honor. But in many, it isn't; it signals 1) that you are lesser than or 2) you are very malleable person who may make a good fall person or dirty deed underling or 3) they don't believe your words and just think it's kind of creepy
I really appreciate that some countries consider it an honor, and I don't know where or who you work with, but there's a very good chance that your favorite valediction is not only underappreciated, but not appreciated at all.
Hope that's not the case but your closing comment sparked me to be candid about it for consideration.
I always laugh a little when I get emails from someone still in college. They are so formal, even after I reply in a less formal manner. I don’t blame them as I did the same thing.
I'm still pretty formal with new clients. It takes me years to leave out a valediction with some. But on the other hand, my favorite valediction is usually "Cheers," since it seems the most casual and least demanding. Still, I always worry this gives away the fact that I'm an alcoholic.
My runner up is "Yours," which I see didn't make the list.
Maybe it's an effective filter. I use cheers too. If someone is too formal to enjoy cheers, then I probably don't want them as a client. I put out casual, easy-going and hard working. Cheers aligns.
Candidly, I think "Yours" is just weird. Maybe even kind of creepy? Just roll with cheers and forget about it!
Used to be "Yours Truly," which is maybe less weird. I mean first time contacts - new clients. After the first few emails, "Cheers" seemed friendly and okay.
I still feel very much on the hook when a customer raises a support request. That means we have a bug. If we talk often, that means they are a very good customer but we have a lot of bugs…
Therefore I stick to “Best regards” mechanically. Note that I’m French, not native in English, so I’m not mastering colloquialities. Would it be appropriate to be more relaxed?
I think "Best regards" is always acceptable. Inevitably though it comes from either a Brit or a non-native speaker. I really love the French and Spanish sign-offs... Cordialement or the very warm Un abrazo which I get from business associates in Spain. English "regards" seem very cold by comparison.
As a French person, two lines of valediction on paper letters is always funny, and yet required. Especially since the form should be adapted depending on whether you show respect for the person or not.
I once wrote both an employee’s resignation and my acceptance for the conditions of it (on his request for both, he’s non-native), and it was awkward to try to find a valediction that doesn’t put him as inferior.
I had no idea that the form was supposed to be adapted, based on the nature of the relationship.
You can have a fairly good command of a foreign language, but still fail at communicating. You also need to understand cultural conventions and customs, and for that there's no substitute for living there.
I've never written a formal letter in French. I don't know why they sent me to school at all, really.
/me went to a French school, in France, for two years. When I was 4. I know French nursery rhymes.
> "Veuillez agréer, Monsieur, l'expression de mes sentiments les plus agréeables"
That would actually be somewhat familiar for a formal letter. You probably wouldn’t use "les plus agréable" here but rather "respectueux" or "les meilleurs". People just copy and paste them from the internet nowadays when they need to use one.
I think "cheers" would be a variant of "Cheerio", which just means goodbye - nothing to do with booze.
I never had a sig - not for email, not for Usenet. At one time I just signed off with my name; nowadays I make do with a bare carriage-return. I figure people will be able to work out when they've got to the end.
Yeah I advise early stage startups and they are either way too formal, or completely lacking in the basic understanding of how to communicate professionally.
Like it's either
"Dear Sir, I am writing to acknowledge that you RSVP'ed yes to our calendar invitation" or
"sorry about missing the meeting. we didn't end up making a power point, so we'll just send you a couple drawings our friend did of a different thing that's pretty close to what we were thinking of doing."
I hate it when people use thanks for everything. What, you're thanking me for reading the email announcing the re-org? It reads as mindless and weird.
I'm a "best" guy. It's never inappropriate. Whether I'm promoting you, firing you, reporting up on progress or problems, "best" always works.
(I'm not saying it's the best closer in all situations, but if you hate thinking about closers, it's the best generic choice. And the best boss I ever had always used it.)
These things may be somewhat culturally determined (including office/corporate culture). To me, "best" reads as mindless as any other.
In fact, they all read as mindless to me, probably because in most cases they literally are mindless. You choose one and write it automatically in nearly every message.
That's not to say they're useless. Politeness in social interactions is filled with formulaic, almost ritualistics niceties. I just don't think there's all that much difference in meaning between these common formulaic responses.
“Best” is the worst. Like it’s the best you’ve got. And there is no interest or room for negotiation, development or debate. “Thanks” likewise isn’t very good and sounds too impersonal and somewhat dismissive. I started using “thank you” for a more sincere, serious tone in business communication. I use it because “regards” irks me for some reason.
On moving to the UK and for the first time using English "full time" it took me longer than it should have to get used to "how are you?" as merely a "friendly noise".
At first I found it incredibly rude how people would ask me a question and then keep walking while I stopped to start answering their question.
Funnily "How are you?" used to be an actual question in the UK. The shift to it being a generic greeting you don't answer is relatively new and I think an americanism. I remember having the same reaction when I went to Uni 11 years ago, It was a Scottish Uni but something like 15-20% of students were american. They'd ask that passing by and I'd stop to answer leading to several awkward encounters.
That said even when it was a question it was expected that you replied something along the lines of "I'm good thanks, you?". Unless it was a good friend you never replied negatively, though if you had good news it was fine to expand.
I absolutely think you're right that it's an Americanism. I actually worked at Yahoo in London when I started noticing it, about 18 years ago, and the office was full of Americans and they were most prone to using it.
> That said even when it was a question it was expected that you replied something along the lines of "I'm good thanks, you?". Unless it was a good friend you never replied negatively, though if you had good news it was fine to expand.
Yeah, that was my expectation as well - the answer needs to be adjusted to how close you are, and so it's mostly relatively perfunctory. But occasionally you get more detail than you bargained for.
It has to say something about a society where we ask about someone's well-being with absolutely no intention (and often no interest) in receiving an answer.
Perhaps it was originally just superficial politeness as well, and so over time the process was abbreviated to match the empty intent.
I know that now, hence why that is the first thing my comment makes clear.
The point was that it's not at all obvious that it's not a question to someone not used to it being used as a greeting, given that it's worded as a question, and the intonation is given as a question, and given that many places in the world you wouldn't say the equivalent unless you're actually asking a question.
English feels to me to be pretty extreme relative to other languages with respect to the sheer number of terms that have been reduced to "friendly noises" and stripped of all meaning, to the point that it leads to the number of comments in this thread discussing the nuances of terms the sender most of the time has put no thought into.
I still tend to feel someone who throws out a "friendly noise" like this are usually being rude by using a question as a greeting, because whether you like it or not, it's implicitly acknowledging you don't really care, and so I avoid using it.
I wonder why this is. I only speak english so don't have other languages to compare it to. But we use a lot of idioms too, is that also less common in other languages? Could it be because of the wide range of cultures that speak English as their first and only language?
I know there are other languages as or more widely natively spoken (Spanish and Mandarin come to mind) but isn't it common for native speakers of those languages to also natively speak local languages and/or dialects. Could the number of "friendly noises" and idioms in English be because most english speakers only speak english?
In your specific case (ie coming to the UK) you've also the interesting thing where lots of americanisms have been adopted here, while still Britishisms remain. Different regions of Britain also strongly maintain a lot of their own "isms" (Scottish-isms for example) and we still tend to use them with other brits out of local pride. So depending where you are in the UK (London would be the extreme example) you'd likely hear Americanisms and Britishisms on a daily basis plus various region specific isms if you were often around people from those areas.
Idioms are common in every language I know (about 4-5 depending on which you count that I speak reasonably, and a few more I can read with some effort).
> Could the number of "friendly noises" and idioms in English be because most english speakers only speak english?
I don't know. My experience is that a lot of languages tends to have a much more formal hierarchy of terms to use for greetings, while English is all over the place. I think maybe part of the challenge is that English is used by people spread out much more and with very varying degree of experience with the language, including people using it as a second language, and so it's in some respect more internally diverse. It also lacks a strong effort to direct the language.
E.g. I'm Norwegian, and Norwegian has an official organ that gives government and the public advice on the evolution of the language, and language reforms have regularly passed as acts of parliament. French has Académie Française. For a lot of languages there are these official or semi-official organisations that sets out how the language will be taught at schools and what the official use should be like. It doesn't stop proliferation of variants (Norwegian authorities have more than once had to admit defeat and undo language reforms that failed to catch on, or just adjust the language to reflect use rather than vice versa), but it does tend to tame it somewhat.
When I first started learning French a quarter of a century ago, one of my classes was "mercantile French" which included lessons on French business correspondence, and one of the things that stuck with me was how much more formal it was (at least back then) in terms of greetings and signoffs and formatting than English correspondence. I'm taking a refresher course for my French these days, and the perceived more formalistic determination of level of formality is quite interesting.
> you've also the interesting thing where lots of americanisms have been adopted here
In defense of using thanks for everything, the "thanks" (at least in my case) is meant more as a "Thanks for taking the time to read this email" and less "Thanks for reading this email" Time is the valuable part there, and someone dedicated the bit of it they have on this earth to read my email.
I can't stand "Best" as a closer. "Best wishes" is OK, as is "Best regards" but "Best" on its own is going to get your email into the "deal with it later" queue.
"Best" is standard practice with Germans, and shows a degree of intimacy-- implying the two parties know each other well enough that an abbreviation is fine.
Given my interactions, I'd be cautious dead-queueing an email on this criteria.
My English teacher thought that "Regards" sounds rude (like starting your emails with "John," instead of "Dear John,") and that one should always use "Best regards" instead.
The previous workplace of mine sets the signatures of my email to start with "Kind regards", and I continue to use it after I left that workplace. I now take a freelance job, and if the contact person isn't really nice to me, I would simply sign "Regards" (not "Kind", as my mood isn't really kind). Glad to hear that it can be viewed as a less polite form.
I don't read regards as fundamentally rude but I do read it as very cold and formal, which can come off in as rude or passive aggressive depending on the context.
I wouldn't bat an eye if a letter from my bank or a formal HR communication signed off with "Regards". But if a colleague from another team or a senior leader ended an email with "Regards" I would find that rude.
That said I've spent the last two years working in the public sector and have come to learn that the standards for communication and presentation are very different here. I'd still consider it rude from a colleague who worked in my directorate (it's a tech directorate) but if it was from someone outside my directorate I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. Though in those cases I also tend to be aggressively informal/casual in my responses.
> Whether I'm promoting you, firing you, reporting up on progress or problems, "best" always works.
“Best” is shorthand for wishing the other person well. Using it while firing someone could be seen (to use your words) as “mindless and weird”, a meaningless and reflexive dismissal which may rub the recipient the wrong way (“if you cared about what’s best for me, you wouldn’t have fired me”).
Where are you based? In the UK cheers acts a generic end of conversation, with connotations of friendliness and informality. I tend to use cheers over thanks when I want to imply a friendly/casual tone or when I've helped the other person out. In the latter case it functions the same as 'your welcome' but without requiring the other person to have said thanks first. Cheers communicates the same tone without the risk of coming off as passive aggressive.
This is why I don't use it. I have a hard enough time managing my email queue. I've found that a good, blunt, "Leave me alone, Bob" is pretty effective at discouraging replies.
The older I get and more professional, the simpler my emails get.
I've long done away with email signatures. I have no signature at all. (Metadata is plenty to let people know my full name, and they can just Google me, or use Superhuman / Rapportive to get info on me in context.)
These days, most of my emails are signed with "-Kenneth" only. No signoff, no signature. The rest don't have a signature at all and just contain a one line response.
For greetings, a simple "Hi" or "Hey" with the recipient(s)' first name does the trick.
Receiving emails with giant email signatures drives me nuts. I don't care to have your logo, 10 contact infos and a giant email disclaimer wasting a full page length of my screen. The worst are the notes "please consider the environment before printing this email." These make me want to roll my eyes so hard.
In the early days of email I would write to a lot of family members who were far away and were also connected to this new gizmo called "the internet". I of course would always sign off with "Love, NAME" as we're family.
That muscle memory would randomly kick in at inconvenient times when I started using it for professional correspondence. Nobody said anything, but I can imagine the cocked eyebrows of someone receiving an email from me with such an effusive sign off!
I didn't have this problem with emails, but with signing off on phone calls. The only people I spoke to on the phone growing up were family members. Probably confused a few telemarketers.
If someone says 'thanks in advance', I presume it's to soften the lack of reply so I don't think it's rude. Also means I don't need to acknowledge their thanks email & we can move it from a 4 email conversation to a 2 email one.
Between colleagues that are already dealing with a lot of email I'm all in favour. (Assuming I already have a decent relationship with this person)
Nothing worse than seeing "thanks, John" at the end of an email because it's a signature that's auto applied. And it stands out because the font/size/color don't match the body of the email
Not sure about other email clients, bit it is definitely possible in Thunderbird to set it up so the "Thanks/Regards/Best/whatever" is in the same font, style, etc. as the body and the rest of the sig is in a different font (that's my standard setup; compose it in TBird, save it out, extract, set as sig file, maybe tweak the HTML a bit).
This whole thread reminds me of another on the use of emojis in work communication. My main takeaway from that, and from this thread to, was the simply rule:
"Presume good intent"
There are so many different cultures of written communication and due to the internet you're far more likely to come across someone who uses a different "written communication culture" than a spoken one. So if someone comes across as rude or inappropriate due to how they word things I try to actively ignore tone, reserve judgement and presume good intentions.
I was skeptical at first, but it could be explained by the implicit wording of the sign-off.
The highest rated sign-off "thanks in advance" implies that you're thanking them for their future action, which is most likely a response to a question in your email.
Whereas the lower rated sign-off's "kind regards" and "best regards" don't imply that you're expecting a response at all.
“Thanks” has become such a disingenuous generic ending on e-mails that I’ve stopped using it altogether. And it hasn’t seemed to reduce my replies or cause people to think I’m “not nice.” I end every single e-mail with “-NW” and if I want to say “thanks” I do it in a real way in the body of the message.
I’ve always been a fan of “Regards” or its somewhat softer sibling “Kind Regards”. Cordial and hard to infer anything negative out of it. I find signing off with your name as you state in your comment to be equally professional and a bit more to the point, but I like a bit more cordiality as a matter of personal preference.
I just end emails with my name. ...Plainly indicating that the email is done and I'm signing off on it. I tend to express any gratitude at the start of the email.
On, what I believe is, a related note (the blog post notes they looked at mailing lists, which are similar), Stackoverflow now considers "Thanks" or anything along those lines to be "noise", yet the person asking the question is trying to elicit feedback, probably quickly and a lot.
That the "community" is against this (which is a contentious claim but certainly a vocal subset are against it) may be an indicator as to why I try not to spend any time on it any more.
Yesterday I was writing an email in Spanish and I put it into DeepL machine learning translation to translate it back to French for me to check if what I wrote made enough sense to be parsed.
I ended the mail with a "Cordialmente" ( ~ Cordially) as it was informal, and it translated this single word to "Veuillez agréer, Madame, Monsieur, l'expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués", which is about the most formal formula possible.
Most I've seen are "Bien à vous" or "Bonne journée".
Actually... what are the most common endings in French emails? Thinking that a website that had all of those sorted out, categorised by language and degree of formality, would be really useful. Sometimes people just want the equivalent of "Cheers" in e.g. Spanish?
"veuillez agréer..." etc is still in use but extremely formal. I can't think of a similarly formal expression in English, other than "I am your most humble and obedient servant".
I wondered about this early in my career, and brought it up at a meeting of teammates. Now certainly our little discussion isn’t enough data to be proper proof, but we decided upon the following:
The phrase “do the needful” is never utter without an undertone of “you fucked up, please fix your fuckup immediately”. The funny part was that none of the Indian folks who used this phrase frequently would cop to it. Strong denials all around. But every example we could find in our email, that tone was certainly there.
The explanation that comes to mind to me is that "thanks" and especially "thanks in advance" are more likely to come at the end of emails that actually require a response, e.g. "Could you send me that TPS report with the new cover sheet? Thanks, Bill".
What’s the p-value on this bad boy? Also I wonder if they controlled for confounding factors. Ones I can think of are: “Thanks” more likely on emails containing requests, which inherently requires response if from colleague; personality could dictate which valediction you choose, which could also be reflected on how you wrote your email; whether “Best” and “Thanks” are used can be very cultural - eg everyone at Microsoft uses “Thanks” ONLY, and it would be very weird to see a “Best” and extremely rare to see a “Cheers”, those same communities may happen to have a larger response rate since some companies have better email culture, thus given their non-random sampling since they just used the responses from a small handful of online communities, that could bias results.
Anyone watch the show Corporate on Comedy Central. They had an episode where an employee's exclamation point key stop working, so all his Thanks! were just Thanks, so his coworkers thought he was being passive aggressive and looked for subtexts in his emails.
I always decide between "Thanks," or "Regards,", or "Thanks and regards" or even the cringey "Thanks and best regards". It depends on the recipient and if I'm asking for something or giving advice.
One day I worry I'm going write an angry email to a group, then typo the sign off with "Retards," and send before I catch it...
I dislike emails that end in "Thank You In Advance" with such a passion. It's so presumptiout to assume that I will agree to whatever the request is; OK, I might, but don't thank me for something I haven't yet agreed to do, you're just implying that I have no option but to agree. These emails have the lowest reply rate in my mailbox.
Seeing comments about "seeming insincere" seems crazy to me. You're keeping up appearances no matter what your signature is, the impression you leave is going to come from the actual content of what you're saying anyway. I'd rather show I don't care about the formalities to encourage whoever I'm emailing to do the same.
I often get slightly angry when the Mail is in the format of:
Hi normal,
Do this.
Thanks.
Greetings,
projectmanager
This implies to me that the other Party has decided my course of action and my time alocation without any discussion about my availability and if the approach makes sense.
I found this[0] a while back, because I always felt "thanks in advance" is just off somehow. They list the following alternatives as examples:
"I really appreciate any help you can provide."
"I will be grateful if you can send me this information."
"Many thanks for considering my request."
"I hope what I have requested is possible."
"In the meantime, thank you so much for your attention and participation."
Often I don't use these word-for-word. The point is, I think, to formulate a closer that's at least a bit customized for the occasion. Then the whole thing will just seem more natural, friendly and human.
I think it's ok to notify an email thread and say something like "Based on our last discussion regarding ____ , Bob is going to _____ . Thanks in advance for setting that up for us @Bob"
But yeah, thanks in advance can be a very passive aggressive thing.
A more flexible alternative would probably be "appreciate your expertise in setting this up for us"
This is long known by skeezy sales.people and they often include "thanks" as part of their signature. Thereby completly devaluing the meaning to the point i now aaaume it is disingenuous whenever i see it
In my experience, if you’re the kind of sociopath who lays down a thick trowel load of passive aggression with a Thanks in advance, you’re probably also good at manipulating me into responding to your request with the rest of your email body too.
"Thanks" garners many responses because people use it in emails that make reasonable requests with a good chance of response.
My favorite valediction is still "I am, &c.," which is short for "I am your humble and obedient servant". Not sure whether my colleagues appreciate it as much as I do...