Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to keynote this year’s Professional Emailers Conference. I never imagined a career in emailing when I stepped foot onto my college campus so many years ago, probably because I didn’t even HAVE an email address until I got there. However, armed with a dream, Outlook, and a 91 word-per-minute typing speed, I stand before you today as a person whose primary job is to sit at a desk and send emails for eight hours a day before going home and sending more emails on my phone. “Sent”-sational, am I right?? Ha ha.
Like I said, I did not go to college for Professional Emailing because emailing wasn’t really a thing in 1998. My first address was issued by Boston University and was something like amanda@bu.edu because no other Amandas had needed an email address prior to that. BU’s email client was a black screen with a blinking neon green cursor and the only address I knew besides my own was that of my boyfriend back in Grand Forks, whom I made sign up for an AOL account so I’d have someone to email. For roughly three years, his nightly, “Hey, beautiful. How was your day?” email was the entirety of my inbox chatter. At the end of the third year, one of my professors got an email address and sent a message reminding me that our midterm was on Wednesday, and that was my second contact. Not six months later, by the start of my senior year of college, everyone’s professors and parents and grandparents and fellow college students had email addresses, and the rest was digital history.
Of course, as we know, simply HAVING an email address does not make one an Emailer. The real mark – or emoji, ha ha – of a Professional Emailer is being able to translate the nuances of face-to-face human communication using only the written word. For that, I credit my childhood summers spent at sleepaway camp.
My first sleepaway camp was a coed camp deep in the Wisconsin woods. We slept in graffitied bunks, shared a bathhouse with a 10:1 ratio of insects and snakes to people, and did crappy activities like “Learn How to Make Lunch for the Whole Camp” and “Book Club.” I did not enjoy that camp, and communicated my dissatisfaction to my parents in my daily post-lunch letter.
“I cry all the time,” I’d write in black even though I had a multi-colored pen. “I’m crying now. Look, here are my tears.” To which an arrow would be pointed to a circled spot on the stationary, a spot that was slightly wrinkled after being wetted and then dried after the long journey from Wisconsin to North Dakota via post.
Today, I channel that same tear-circling energy in my virtual communique.
“I appreciate and understand the emergent nature of your request,” I will email. “Just as I hope you can appreciate and understand that it will not be accommodated.” Un-click imaginary black pen.
My second camp was a girls-only camp in the heart of Minnesota. We slept in glamp-able cabins with in-house bathrooms, stayed far away from the wildlife, and did awesome activities like horseback riding and riflery. Mailtime, like the crappy camp, was after lunch.
I loved, loved mail time. I would sit on my bed, back leaned against the timber wall slats and feet on my trunk – a trunk because in those days we traveled to camp with the same accoutrements as one on a steamer journey across the Atlantic – and wait for my stack of letters to arrive. My parents sent their letters paperclipped to Archie Comic Books. My grandfather’s letters would include cartoons cut out of The New Yorker. My grandmother’s letters would be one long amusing anecdote about a person she’d encountered. My other grandparents would send jokes and gossip about Grand Forks. My uncles, aunts, and parents’ friends sent postcards.
For my part, I had a box of monogrammed stationery (my favorite was pale pink with hot air balloons) and a new multi-colored pen. With a dramatic flourish, I’d pull out a piece of stationary, click down on my initial ink color (I usually switched colors to denote a paragraph change), and get to work.
It was these letters that laid the foundations for my email prowess. Due to the necessary quantity of replies and the shortness of letter-writing time, each could only be one page…and I wrote large. With such a small space to express everything in my heart – personality, feelings, storytelling, and requests for future responses – succinctness, tone, content, and word choice were key.
And, as Dr. VanHootlebergendorfman said so eloquently in his opening address, what are the three most important factors to a Professional Emailer’s email? Succintness, tone, content, and word choice.
“Hellooooo, Grandpa,” I’d write, clicking to switch colors. “Thank you for the cartoon of the surgeons balling a melon. They should have used your melon cutting technique and cut them into quarters and slices to look like smiling mouths. Speaking of melons, why did the cantaloupe jump into the pool? It wanted to become a watermelon. Ha ha. We had watermelon yesterday for lunch, and today we had grapes. We also sang a song about grapes. I will sing it for you after camp is over. Please send more cartoons. I miss you and grandma. Love, Amanda.”
My expertise in letter-writing can also be directly tied to my ability to personalize tone, content, and word choice to the recipient. Here is the type of letter I would write to my parents directly after the one sent to my grandfather.
“Hi, Mom and Dad,” I said, changing colors between each letter before staying on pink for the remainder of the page. “It rained here so I had to wear socks and now I have a rash on my ankle. I ate my fruit at lunch today (grapes) and yes, I’m pooping. I should earn my third-level horseback riding patch so I’ll need you to sew that on my jacket when I get home. Give the dog a kiss for me. Send more Archie Comics because everyone loves them. Love you, A.”
And then to my grandmother:
“Bonjour, Grandmere! Camp is good. It rained the other day so instead of sailing we made candles. I dipped a long piece of string into pails of hot wax over and over until it formed a blob, and then I squeezed it into a shape. I was going to do a heart but my friend did a heart first (her candle was much smaller because she didn’t want to drip wax on her shoes) so I did a squiggle. I don’t know how a squiggle will burn, but that’s the candle’s problem and not mine. Then we ate tuna fish sandwiches and watermelon. I put my potato chips under my bread which I will show you when we are together because it was delish. Love to you and grandpa. Amanda.”
Nowadays, of course, messages such as those would include gifs and photos and follow-up post-scripts…but the skill of this Professional Emailer hearkens back to those camp days of old where one letter conveyed 1,000 emojis.
I hope you all have a shoebox filled with handwritten letters such as mine; and, if you don’t, I hope you find time in your emailing schedule to create one. I look forward to meeting you in an upcoming conference session – the one on BCCs looks particularly compelling – and I wish you all the best, sincerely.
If you read this and thought, “There’s no way Amanda actually saved all of those patches in a scrapbook and kept it for all of these years,” – well, you’d be wrong. Ka-blingo.
This week on North Dakota Today we talked about Omea Sumneing (and her upcoming Corgi Bash), my Nice Person of the Week, as well as an annual wagon train that’s been rolling since 1969. (Valley News Live)
You know I love me a good mural – especially when it comes with a stage! (Fargo Forum)
Grand Forks’ Shelby Frank finished in second place and advanced to the final, UND’s Kenna Curry broke her own school record, and UND’s Jadyn Keeler became a second-team All-American at the NCAA National Championships in hammer throw. (Grand Forks Herald)
Minot’s Barb Solberg and Dickinson’s RubyAnn Stiegelmeier’s books were selected by the North Dakota State Library’s Center for the Book as North Dakota Great Read titles for 2025. (Minot Daily News)
Three people have graduated from addiction thanks to the New Life Center’s Genesis Recovery Program. (Fargo Forum; Found from “Oops Only Good News”)
North Dakota Nice 
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