Contents

• Introduction
• What are manners?
• Online manners
• Informal emails
• Eighteenth-century manners
• Conclusion
• Figures:
  1. Business email
  2. Friendly email
  3. Angry email

Before looking in detail at any specific codes of conduct, it will be useful to define manners in general. In his letters to his sons describing the proper behavior in his contemporary English society, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, described manners as the "necessary ornamental accomplishments (without which, no one living can either please or rise in the world)" (Chesterfield 2). Two important characteristics of manners can be gleaned from this description: They are both "necessary" and "ornamental".

First, manners are "necessary" for acceptability in society. No one without manners would succeed in anything important, in either the personal or business world. In his letters, Lord Chesterfield repeated this point very often to his sons. "Manner is all in everything; it is by manner only that you can please, and consequently rise" (Chesterfield 5).

Second, manners are "ornamental". In other words, good manners do not necessarily deal with the substance of what one says or the deeds one tries to perform. Rather, they deal with how the words are said and how the deeds are done. The most intelligent person in the world, according to Lord Chesterfield, would still require the ability to communicate his or her ideas clearly and politely in order to benefit from them.

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