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Netiquette: The Art of Online Etiquette

Proper etiquette should be observed in all forms of communication. When face-to-face, you communicate not only verbally, but with your body language, hand gestures, and tone of voice. Over a network or the Internet, you do not have the luxury of relaying on additional methods of getting your message across. Therefore, there are some generally accepted techniques when communicating online. Here are several tips that can help you in your communication.

• Keep it short, yet concise. A good rule is to have one (1) subject per message.
• Be complete and use abbreviations sparingly. Make sure everyone is familiar with the jargon that you may use.
• Don't shout. That is, typing in all capital letters.
• Don't mumble. That is, typing in all small case letters.
• Don't critize people. Everyone makes mistakes, ignore spelling errors & other simple errors.
• Online correspondence should contain appropriate salutations, not content only.
• Follow the same standards of politenesss as you do in any other aspect of your life.

Just remember that when you are faced with a question of netiquette, common sense will guide you.

Observing proper netiquette doesn't mean you cannot use some abbreviations or have fun in your messages. There are several abbreviations & little caricatures (aka smileys or emoticons) that can create faces from the common keyboard. The standard way to view smileys is to tilt your head to the left. Here are a few:

Here are some abbreviations that are commonly used:

For more information on acceptable netiquette, please refer to:

Network Etiquette

The Net: User Guidelines & Netiquette

If you have any other"smileys", abbreviations or know of any links that would be useful to our Netiquette segment, please send us an email.

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