Online Writing Guide

Never give your user ID or password to someone. Someone could use your account to post objectional material or destroy your account data. However, system administrators need full access your account for maintenance purposes.

The tone and content should match the purpose of your communication. E-mail sent to friends would have a different tone and content that those which you would send to your professor or your boss. Try to keep these distinctions in mind as you would in face-to-face correspondence. Tone is difficult to convey when communicating via e-mail. You also can't see facial expressions. Because of these factors, what you say can easily be misinterpreted, so always review what you have written before you send it. Once sent, you can't take it back.

If your professors use e-mail to conduct class business and keep in touch with students, it is your responsibility to read your e-mail on a regular basis and respond promptly.

It is your responsibility to join the relevant New Century College student listservs to keep up with information for students.

Don't use an academic listserv to send personal e-mail messages to friends. Send to them individually or create your own "friends" distribution list.

When replying to a message, don't resend the whole original message. Only insert a relevant "clip" to orient your reader to what you are responding to.

Delete unnecessary messages so your space on the server does not get overloaded; if it does, messages to you will be undeliverable. Your "mail box" will be too full to receive new mail.

Create folders to organize your e-mail messages (for example, according to subject, course, projects, etc.)

Save important information on a disk or hard drive and print a copy. Itis easy to accidentally delete important messages in e-mail.