Certain Habits

Ruth McCann explores the etiquette of email closings in Monday’s Washington Post and discovers no convention, or best practices, to guide us. Which makes me feel less bad for being so haphazard in my email closings. Where have the great valedictions—those long sentences, adverbial clause stack upon adverbial clause, each with its own line, so conventional in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—gone? Even the short, “I am, sincerely yours,” brings a note to an elegant and complete close. “Sincerely” is blunt by comparison.