Email without a greeting or a closing
email-greeting-closingon by default (info)Japanese / English
A work email that opens without a greeting or ends without a closing
Example
How to fix
Open with a greeting such as "Dear Ms Lee," and end with a closing such as "Best regards," before your name.
Why it matters
A work email is expected to open with a greeting and end with a closing. Without the greeting it reads as a bare demand; without the closing it looks cut off. Both go missing when a draft is pasted in or the body is copied from an earlier email. chaff points out a body whose first lines hold no greeting ("Dear", "Hi", "Hello") or whose last lines, the name and contact lines included, hold no closing ("Best regards", "Sincerely", "Thanks"). The words come from a lexicon.
What it does not flag
Quoted replies (lines starting with ">"), the header and the signature after "-- " are not read. When a letter opens with lines that end no sentence (the date, the address block, the sender, a title), the greeting is looked for up to the first sentence after them. A memo, with a label such as "TO:" or "SUBJECT:" in capitals before the first sentence, is asked for neither a greeting nor a closing, and nor is a newsletter whose title (a heading) holds an issue number (Vol. 12, Vol.12, メールマガジン第90号). Which greeting or closing is used is not decided; any word in the lexicon will do. Only the email and letter genre runs this rule.
Turning it off or relaxing it
Technical details
- Layer
- L2
- Status
- stable
- Severity
- info
- Languages
- Japanese and English
- Suited to
- business/email, legal, docs, academic, literature, speech
Levels
Set a level for this rule under rules in chaff.yaml. With nothing set, it runs at the level its genre gives it (see By genre below).
| strict | warning |
|---|---|
| normal | info |
| relaxed | info |
This rule has no limit to count to. A level sets how a finding is marked: relaxed keeps the finding and marks it a step lower.
By genre
- Runs by default in
- business/email
- Turned off by the genre in
- legal/contract, legal/statute, legal/judgment, legal/patent, docs/manual, docs/faq, docs/glossary, academic/paper, literature/fiction, literature/essay, literature/poetry, literature/play, speech/address, speech/transcript
- Not suited to, and not run in
- technical/spec, technical/readme, blog/tech, blog/essay, blog/owned-media, business/proposal, business/report, business/press-release, business/meeting-notes
Message
The email has no greeting or no closing
The email does not open with a greeting
The email does not end with a closing
Rewrite depth (chaff fix-plan --depth): light — words and sentences; the structure and the voice stay
This page is built from the rule's definition file:packages/chaff/rules/email-greeting-closing.yaml