The Greeting: "Hi" versus "Dear" and the Perils In Between

British workplace correspondence lives or dies on its opening line. The rough rule is simple: "Dear" is for strangers, ceremonies and bad news. Use it for a first email to an external contact, for anyone whose title is longer than their name, and for the client you are about to tell that delivery has slipped again. Otherwise it lands oddly — "Dear Sarah" to a colleague you have worked beside for six years reads less like politeness and more like a legal notice.

"Hi" is the everyday default, and "Hello" is the dignified middle ground. Avoid "Hey" unless you know the person well; in a British office it can sound like you are about to ask them for money. And do check the spelling of names — nothing undermines a friendly opening like misspelling Cathryn for the third time this week.

Subject Lines Should Do Actual Work

A subject line is not a place for mystery. "Quick question" tells the recipient nothing except that their afternoon is about to be interrupted. "Following up" is worse: it reminds them you have followed up before, which is precisely what they were trying to forget.

Be specific enough that someone can triage the message without opening it:

• Include the project, the action and the deadline — Budget sign-off — Q3 marketing — needed by Thursday.
• Keep it under roughly sixty characters so it survives a phone screen.
• If the conversation changes direction, start a new thread. Nothing is more disorienting than a chain about catering that has quietly become a chain about redundancies.
• Don't put the whole message in the subject line and leave the body empty. It reads as a shrug.

And please, no full capitals. YOUR DEADLINE HAS MOVED looks like an alarm; the same words in sentence case look like a person.

Reply-All: The Button That Has Ended Friendships

There is no British office tradition quite so cherished as the reply-all pile-on. It begins with one person copying three colleagues and ends with forty-seven people, none of whom are involved. It is then concluded by someone replying to all to ask to be removed from the thread, which adds one more to the count.

The rule is simple: ask whether every recipient actually needs this. If the answer is no, reply to the sender. If you are writing "thanks" to a mass email, send it to the person who sent it and spare the other two hundred. If you hit reply-all in error, a short, self-deprecating apology to the same list is acceptable — once. Apologising for the apology, to all, is not.

One further caution: before you forward a thread, scroll down. Somewhere near the bottom there is usually a sentence that was never meant to travel.

Sign-Offs and the Hierarchy of Warmth

The British sign-off is a subtle instrument, and most of us are reading it more closely than we admit. Roughly, from warm to frosty:

• Many thanks — the workhorse. Friendly, appreciative, safe almost anywhere.
• Thanks — efficient; fine with people you know.
• Best wishes — a little more formal, still kind.
• Kind regards — neutral and correct. The plain biscuit of sign-offs.
• Regards — the temperature has dropped. Something has gone wrong.
• Best — ambiguous at home, faintly curt abroad.

If you usually write "Many thanks" and you suddenly sign off "Regards", your reader will spend an hour working out what they did. And if you would not say "Love" to the person in a meeting, do not type it in an email.

Tone, Humour and the Trouble with Deadpan

British humour is dry, understated and almost entirely dependent on a face. In writing it loses its audience. "Great idea, as always" is a compliment in one meeting and a knife in another, and your reader will choose the worse interpretation more often than you would like.

So keep irony out of email unless you know the recipient very well, and be wary of phrases that seem harmless but land as an attack: "as I said", "obviously", "just to clarify" and the devastating "per my last email". If you need to chase, use warmth instead — "Just floating this back to the top of your inbox; no rush if you're buried."

Small signals do a lot of work. One exclamation mark reads as friendly; three read as a hostage situation. A single line of thanks at the top of a request softens the whole message.

Chasing, Deadlines and the Sunday Night Email

Give people a deadline in the original message rather than springing one on them later. "Could you let me have your comments by Thursday?" is a courtesy, not an imposition. After that, chase internally at about forty-eight hours and externally at about a week — and always offer an escape route. "I know this week has been busy" costs nothing and tends to get a quicker reply.

Two habits worth keeping. Make your out-of-office useful: dates, an alternative contact, and when you will actually reply. And be thoughtful about the Sunday night email. Scheduling it for Monday morning takes six seconds and spares your colleagues a small, unnecessary lurch. That is what good manners largely are — small adjustments that cost nothing and save somebody else a moment of dread.