Just now, I wrote an email and I couldn’t for the life of me think how to sign it off. ‘Kind regards’, the default setting for most messages, felt a bit too formal, given I am on friendly terms with the recipient; he’s older than me and a priest. ‘Yours ever’ seems forward. ‘Best wishes’ is fine for strangers but may be stilted for someone you know quite well. ‘M’, my most frequent sign-off, would look downright rude. An ‘X’ was out of the question. So plain ‘Melanie’ it was.
But I was left wondering which of the range of options I should have gone for, each suggestive of a slight difference on the register from intimacy to formality. Get it wrong in one direction and you look standoffish; get it wrong in the other and you look like you’re taking liberties.
Emails and texts are informal in nature and that has made written communications more fraught. I dimly recall from Barbara Cartland’s invaluable Book of Etiquette that letters were governed by fairly simple rules: ‘Yours ever’ for intimates, ‘Yours faithfully’ for a Dear Sir letter, ‘Yours truly’ for a shop. And I suppose it was ‘Yours sincerely’ for every other formal letter.
Trouble is, emails seem easy-going, but we’re using them for lots of work messages too. And the rules are fluid. I consulted one former cabinet minister who said he used to sign off messages to other MPs with ‘Yours ever’; but the other day he wrote to a former colleague and found that it sounded wrong, so it was ‘Yours’ instead. That’s how things change — you just feel your way.
So, I’ve gone through some of the possibilities for concluding an email; yours may of course be different:
1.
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