Hey you! That's not how you write an e-mail

A few weeks ago, Talitha wrote that something amazing had happened to her – she received a real letter in the mail (of the snail variety) from a friend.

There's no question – the way we write to communicate with each other has been changing very quickly in the last few years. E-mails have replaced letters, status updates and texting have been replacing e-mail, and in the meantime, no one is sure about what's right and what's wrong.

For instance, how do you start an e-mail? In English, the accepted way to start a letter in most cases is "Dear Mr/Ms/Dr So-and-so". But should you start an e-mail this way? Every so often, I wonder about this myself.  Depending on the situation, who I'm writing to, how I'm writing it (on a phone or a computer) I'll use everything from "Dear ..." to "Hi", "Hello", "Hey", "Hey there", "Yo", "Dude!" to nothing at all. Now, after reading this from the BBC, I have to ask myself if I'm helping to kill the English language and etiquette?

OK, no, I'm not really that concerned. But it did make me think of you, dear reader, trying to make your way through this tangled web of foreign language and custom.

One of the arguments against using "Dear" to start an e-mail is that it is too familiar, intimate. I have to say, before I learned German, I had never thought of it. Only when I thought of writing the German equivalent, did I think of "Dear" as having any meaning beyond its use as a greeting. 

So what should you do? Use common sense. Think of the person you're writing to, what your relationship is, and when in doubt, "Dear" is never wrong. "Hey there" and "Dude!" on the other hand you might want to save for only your dearest friends.