Emailing Strangers

I feel uncomfortable whenever I need to send an email to someone I don't know. I think the opening is the hardest part.

Not really, I think closing the email is even harder.

But let's start at the beginning (the salutation). I looked through my "sent" box to see what my most common salutations were when addressing strangers. Many of them said, "To Whom It May Concern," or just the person's name followed by a comma (and no "Dear" because how can they be dear if I don't even know them?). I also had a few that said, "Hello There," or "Hello," and the ones I wasn't as concerned about what they might think of me had no salutation at all.

I think these greetings feel just as awkward now as they felt when I wrote them, but I believe I did the best that I could with the options I had available to me.

The farewell phrase just before the name of the writer is called a valediction. We have all likely seen a letter that begins with "Salutations," but I've never seen anyone sign a letter with "Valedictions," although I'm tempted to start. Maybe it will catch on.

My common valedictions to strangers were "Sincerely," "Best Regards," and "Thank You," but I have to tell you right now that only the first one of these is correct because I didn't know until very recently that only the first word of a valediction is supposed to be capitalized. I'm not even sure how I could have missed this information for so many years, but at least I know now. I even signed a letter to a friend with, "Best Wishes Always, A." Now I wonder if she knew my mistake(s), and if she did, WHY DIDN'T SHE TELL ME?

Do I wish we would just capitalize all the words in all the greetings and farewells to make things easier? Absolutely. But as I said in another post, I don't make the grammar rules, I just try to keep them. Oh, and one more thing: to make a salutation more formal, use a colon instead of a comma.

Because I have a hard time remembering things, I have come up with these thoughts: 1. The beginning of every word in the salutation is capitalized because we just showed up and we are making a good first impression by being loud and clear. 2. The only exception to this is if the greeting includes the receiver's name (for example, "Good afternoon, LaVern,") because we don't want LaVern to feel like we are yelling at her. 3. The valediction only has first-word capitalization because at this point, we are already figuratively walking away (even though we still need to sign/type our names, but that doesn't fit in the visual note I am trying to make here, so don't worry about that detail).

If you are tired of worrying about which greeting or farewell to use in an email to a stranger, the only advice I have is to make friends with the person so you can then start with, "Sup, Bruh?"

Until then, I hope this helps.