What PS Means and How to Use It Correctly in Your Email

In the days before email, Paul McCartney famously sang, “PS I love you” on The Beatles’ 1963 album, Please Please Me. But what does PS mean and how do we use it in modern communication?

What Is the Meaning of PS?

PS stands for postscript. It comes from the Latin postscriptum, which literally means “written after.” A postscript is an additional thought added to letters (and sometimes other documents) that comes after it has been completed.

Here’s a tip: People wonder—does the PS come before or after the signature? Since a postscript is an addition that comes after a letter is completed, it should always follow the signature.

In the days of handwritten and typed letters, we often found ourselves remembering something we wanted to include only after we’d signed off. That’s where a PS came in handy. It’s also often used for effect to add a clever or funny afterthought. It can be added for emphasis, or even as an argumentative “So there!” It’s a tool still used in direct and email marketing, which we’ll talk about in a moment.

The P.S. is the most charming part of a letter. It’s the wink you give as you walk away.

—Shaun Usher, author of Letters of Note, for The Wall Street Journal

 

---

READ: The 15 Most Common Email Mistakes of 2017

---

How to Punctuate and Format PS

Should PS be capitalized? How is it abbreviated; with (P.S.) or without (PS) periods? Should you use any trailing punctuation? Surprisingly, there are no hard and fast answers to these questions.

The Cambridge Dictionary suggests that PS is the proper format in British English.

PS Don’t forget to let the cat in before you go to bed.

The Cambridge Dictionary also says that P.S. (with periods after each letter) is the American English format. Indeed, you’ll often find it abbreviated as such in the US. But The Chicago Manual of Style favors PS, without the periods.

The verdict? Usage varies, and PS doesn’t factor into most style guides. The safest bet is to capitalize the P and S (use periods after each letter if that’s your preference), and leave out any trailing punctuation.

PS in Email

PS once saved us from having to edit or rewrite an entire letter just to include an important afterthought. But email allows us to go back and edit before sending. Technically, we could avoid the use of PS altogether in electronic communication. But should we?

Not really. PS is still useful for effect, and it’s a great way to get a specific point noticed. Although the Internet has made us a culture of skimmers rather than people who read things like email word-for-word, we tend to notice what’s at the beginning and end of a text. Can you think of a time when you didn’t read the PS in an email you cared enough about to open?

Including a PS has long been a direct mail marketing strategy. Statistics once showed that as many as 79 percent of people who opened a direct mail letter would read the PS first. Although times have changed, email marketers still swear by it as a way to reiterate a call to action, create FOMO, provide some sort of bonus information or offer, or even share a testimonial.

Examples of PS in a Letter

To demonstrate just how effective a PS can be, here are some examples from letters written by famous and notable people. (Read more at Letters of Note.)

John Lennon

We opened this article with The Beatles, so let’s return to that theme for a moment. Here’s a letter John Lennon famously wrote to a groupie who dissed Yoko Ono. This PS isn’t exactly an I love you.

Yoko’s been an artist before you were ever a groupie. Why don’t you open your box and dig ‘Mind Train’ on [Yoko/Plastic Ono band album] ‘Fly’? Your prejudices can’t be that deep.

Love, John Lennon

P.S. You might have an aging problem. Me? I wouldn’t go back one day!

Ronald Reagan

This excerpt comes from a letter Ronald Reagan penned to his son, Michael, in 1971, shortly after Michael was married.

. . . Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.

Love,

Dad

P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say “I love you” at least once a day.

Philip K. Dick

In 1973, four years before it was published, Philip K. Dick sent his agent, Scott Meredith, an outline of his novel A Scanner Darkly. This cover letter includes an enthusiastic PS.

Dear Scott:

Here is the outline for my proposed new novel. A SCANNER DARKLY, which I told you about. It’s a good long outline, running well over sixty pages. I guess you can’t sell it to any publisher until I write a bunch of sample chapters, but anyhow this is what I’ll be working on for quite some time.

If you’d like to show it—for example to Doubleday—that would of course be fine with me. Otherwise, hang onto this outline while I continue from my carbon.

Let me know what you think of it, and meanwhile I’ll keep you posted as to how I’m coming with the novel itself.

Cordially,

Philip K. Dick

P.S. I swear, Scott, this is shaping up to be the greatest novel ever written. Or at least the greatest novel I’ve ever written, anyhow.

Richard Feynman

Influential American physicist Richard Feynman (a 1965 Nobel Prize winner) lost his wife and high school sweetheart, Arline, when she died of tuberculosis at age 25. In October 1946, sixteen months after Arline’s death, he wrote her a tender love letter, which remained in a sealed envelope until after his death in 1988.

. . . I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich.

PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.

Empathy vs. Sympathy

• Empathy is a term we use for the ability to understand other people’s feelings as if we were having them ourselves.
• Empathy can also mean projecting our own feeling onto a work of art or another object.
• Sympathy refers to the ability to take part in someone else’s feelings, mostly by feeling sorrowful about their misfortune.
• Sympathy can also be used in relation to opinions and taste, like when you say that you have sympathy for a political cause.

In 1855, Walt Whitman described his reaction to a person in pain in his poem “Song of Myself.”

I do not ask a wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person, My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

What did the poet mean when he said that he would “become the wounded person?” Would his transformation be an example of empathy or sympathy? What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy? The words are easy to confuse. They are both derived from Greek, and the spelling only differs by a couple of letters. It’s almost as if they were made to be used as synonyms. But they weren’t.

The Difference Between Sympathy and Empathy

Of the two words, empathy is the more recent entry into the English language. Sympathy was in use for almost 300 years before empathy’s first written record in the nineteenth century. You might notice that both words contain -pathy, and that’s what makes them sort of similar – they share the same Greek root word pathos, which means “feelings” or “emotion,” but also “suffering” or “calamity.” But while both words deal with emotions, they are still very far from being synonyms.

What Is Sympathy?

Sympathy derives from Greek words meaning “with feeling.” The word is most commonly used to describe the way we share someone else’s feelings, especially feelings of sorrow or trouble. Hence, greeting cards given to mourning families are called sympathy cards. Sympathy can also refer to the sense of harmony between people with the same tastes, disposition, or opinions. When a person feels sympathy toward a cause or an organization, he has feelings of approval, loyalty, or support.

What Is Empathy?

The Greek phrase that lends empathy its meaning is “passion from feelings or emotion.” Most people know empathy has to do with understanding and sharing the experiences, feelings, and emotions of another person. However, empathy can also refer to using imagination to ascribe your feelings or attitudes to an object, such as a painting or a natural object.

Examples: Sympathy and Empathy in Sentences

Which quality was Whitman illustrating in his poem? Empathy. By becoming “the wounded person,” he vicariously experiences their suffering. Is it possible to completely understand how someone else feels? Most people have to content themselves with feeling sympathy—the quality of caring about someone’s misfortunes or the feeling of emotional or intellectual accord with another individual. Neil deGrasse Tyson proposes that since “humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others . . . maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, [we learned] ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.’” But if you finished your schooling, maybe these examples might help you understand the difference between sympathy and empathy: A Canadian woman has criticised a “disgusting” sympathy card sent by two “ambulance chasing” estate agents offering their services following the death of her mother. —The Telegraph

So I have to say that my sympathy for Tyrone would be fairly limited. —The Irish Times

From an evolutionary standpoint, empathy is a valuable impulse that helps humans survive in groups. —The Atlantic

People with a higher level of empathy learn to help others more quickly than their more hard-hearted peers, scientists say. —The Guardian

5 Email Habits to Keep Your Inbox (and Coworkers) Happy

It’s that rare, beautiful Monday when you make it to the office early. Your commute wasn’t as vexing as usual, your coffee’s still hot, and no one is around yet. Your heart races at this delicious opportunity to get some actual work done without the usual distractions.

You peel open your laptop only to discover twenty-seven unread emails. Your shoulders slump in despair. How many of these even matter? Do any of them? What if one does and you miss it? Better start sifting.

Your frustration rises as you realize a dozen of these don’t concern you at all—someone from another department decided to “loop you in” on their discussion of an article their acupuncturist forwarded. Scrolling down, that was before, let’s see . . . six others chimed in, reply-all style. Argh. Deep breaths.

The gaucheries and perturbations of email are many, but we’ve noticed a few that are especially reviled—the kind of mistakes a paragon of email etiquette such as yourself would never make. Lead your colleagues by example: here’s our countdown of sound email habits to keep in mind.

5Avoid CC overcrowding

Chet, your company’s new copywriter, is drafting a few words for Pauline in the design department to use. Pauline’s deputy, Brandon, will be filling in for her on Thursday, so Chet copies him as well. Gotta be thorough.

Chet’s also not certain he’s accurately summarizing Gwyn’s explanation of their next release, so why not copy her, too, for clarification? Gwyn said something about the wording needing a legal review, so, Chet reasons, better loop those guys in. And Mia, the project manager, hates not knowing what’s going on, so, well, you see where this is headed. Back away from the send button, Chet.

A relatively small task can rapidly balloon into an all-staff inbox nightmare if you’re not judicious. And even if you mean well and have good reasons, otherwise decent humans sometimes do indecent things with the reply-all button. Are you willing to risk it?

If it’s vital to send an email to a lot of people at once, consider putting their addresses in the BCC field, so those who respond won’t clog dozens of other inboxes.

Another solution for Chet might be to break this task up into smaller pieces: update the designers in one email, check in with Gwyn in another, pop by the legal corral and ask when they can talk, and apprise Mia at this afternoon’s planning meeting. Speaking of which . . .

4Know when and when not to email

Email is a fine tool, but it’s often a poor substitute for real-time conversation—particularly the kind where you need room to ask or answer follow-up questions and clarify as you go along. Some examples:

• Consulting with HR about your new insurance plan? An exhaustive email explanation sounds like a chore to read, let alone write. Grab a notepad and talk it through.
• Querying an expert about a complex technical matter? Some back-and-forth conversation might help you grok the particulars more quickly than email.
• Discussing sensitive details with the payroll department or the company lawyer? Your Sent folder might not be the best repository for such tasty secrets.

The flip side of this balancing act is knowing when you should send an email. Sometimes the matter simply doesn’t merit a full-on conversation. Moments like these are when email shines.

If the issue is urgent—as in, today, now urgent—you might be better off sending a message, rather than waiting for recipients to check their inbox.

3Don’t forget the subject line

Not everyone empties their inbox daily, or perhaps ever.

A reporter who gets a hundred emails each day, some crucial and others inane, might triage which ones seem worth her time to even open. Such quick judgments hinge on the subject line. Assuming you don’t want your correspondences with busy people to go forever ignored, you have to make clear why you’re writing, and that it matters.

Also, keep it brief. There’s no need for your subject line to resemble a micro-poem of your email’s contents.

Pro tip: Some veteran emailers, wary of potentially firing off a half-written note, don’t put a valid email address in the To line until they’re ready to mash Send. Instead, they temporarily paste the recipient’s address in the subject line, where it will be easy to find and move once the time comes. This last step can be a useful reminder to fill in that subject line.

2Neither a “+1” responder nor an over-forwarder be

Respecting people’s inboxes means taking ownership over what your sent folder says about you.

A colleague who writes a thoughtful, lucid email that brightens your day deserves better than a thumbs-up emoji back. This kind of “+1” response is akin to saying “cool beans” and changing the subject when a friend offers you a ride to the airport. Don’t you want to show a bit more in the way of appreciation, or at least acknowledgment?

Similarly, a tangled thread of to-dos, follow-ups and maybe-someone-in-finance-can-answer-that uncertainties is rarely made better by sharing it with still more people. When you become part of the forwarded-message juggling troupe, constantly shunting messages in random directions with little regard for what it means or to whom, it implies nothing you’re writing or sharing really matters. You can do better.

1Don’t ambush people by casually threading in their boss

Suppose you’ve been emailing back and forth with someone, telling them something they don’t want to hear. You’ve managed to keep things relatively polite up until now: “No, I’m sorry, that timeframe isn’t realistic,” you’re saying. “Yes, I understand your concern, but the legal team says we can’t change that wording.”

Then comes the bombshell in their next reply: they’re CC-ing your manager. Apparently, this person is unhappy with your responses and has decided an escalation is in order. Oof.

There are plenty of times when it makes sense to add someone’s boss to a thread, but this isn’t one of them. This kind of sneak attack leaves people feeling burned; your next interaction with them will likely fall short of cordial. In other words, it’s not a good look. And it risks burning bridges the next time you have to work together.

Fortunately, this one is easy to avoid; all you have to do is not blindside people by trying to use their boss as a cudgel.

Thanks for reading this far, and please refrain from hitting reply-all in your response.

Present Perfect Tense

The present perfect tense refers to an action or state that either occurred at an indefinite time in the past (e.g., we have talked before) or began in the past and continued to the present time (e.g., he has grown impatient over the last hour). This tense is formed by have/has + the past participle.

The construction of this verb tense is straightforward. The first element is have or has, depending on the subject the verb is conjugated with. The second element is the past participle of the verb, which is usually formed by adding -ed or -d to the verb’s root (e.g., walked, cleaned, typed, perambulated, jumped, laughed, sautéed) although English does have quite a few verbs that have irregular past participles (e.g., done, said, gone, known, won, thought, felt, eaten).

These examples show how the present perfect can describe something that occurred or was the state of things at an unspecified time in the past.

I have walked on this path before.

We have eaten the lasagna here.

The important thing to remember about the present perfect is that you can’t use it when you are being specific about when it happened.

I have put away all the laundry.

I have put away all the laundry this morning.

You can use the present perfect to talk about the duration of something that started in the past is still happening.

She has had the chickenpox since Tuesday.

These young grammar police don’t fool around. Would you join the force?

Smosh gets 100% credit for commitment. These grammar-loving cops don’t kid around!

Q&A with Martha Brockenbrough, Founder of National Grammar Day

Martha Brockenbrough is the founder of National Grammar Day and author of The Game of Love and Death, which comes out April 28 and has received starred reviews from Kirkus Books and Publishers Weekly. Martha recently spoke with the Grammarly team to provide some insight into National Grammar Day and to share her perspective on language.

Grammarly: You established National Grammar Day in 2008. When did you realize that such a holiday was necessary?

Martha: “Necessary” might not be the first word I’d choose. Food, water, love, underpants. All of these are necessary things. But I knew National Grammar Day would be a lot of fun. Fun is necessary, too, and as soon as I learned the holiday did not yet exist, I set about creating it. I was inspired by the high school students I was teaching at the time. They needed a bit of help with their grammar, and I wanted to make the learning experience lively and positive. Everyone can probably remember that teacher who made grammar seem difficult or unpleasant. I wanted to show my students the fun they could have with language. They more they knew about how it worked, the more they could do, much in the same way you play better basketball when you know all of the rules.

Speaking of rules: Much has been said about the fact that many so-called rules in our language aren’t. That’s quite true. But it doesn’t mean people don’t have certain expectations about the grammar we use. Hiring managers, potential dates: People will judge you if your grammar is non-standard, just as they will judge you for wearing a Speedo to a black-tie event (even with a black tie, which would be the worst).

G: What is your biggest grammar pet peeve?

M: I try not to keep too many pet peeves. That said, every time I see “your” instead of “you’re,” my soul shrivels a little more.

G: Is there a grammar rule you don’t mind bending/breaking?

M: There are plenty of so-called “rules” that really and truly aren’t. It’s fine, for example, to begin a sentence with a conjunction. You probably don’t want to do this a lot, because it makes your writing sound choppy. But it’s perfectly fine style. Same goes for ending a sentence with a preposition.

As a novelist, though, I routinely and purposefully bend the language as many ways as I possibly can to create memorable characters who feel authentic. All we have with novels are words, and out of this, we create not only worlds, but all of their inhabitants. Books breathe, in many cases, because of the artful bending of words, punctuation, and expectations. Mark Twain, an absolute genius with language (and a proponent of simplified spelling), depended utterly on making rubber out of rules. Imagine how awful it would be if someone standardized the grammar in Huckleberry Finn. That would be like putting a tasteful blouse on the Venus de Milo.

Again, it’s about context. If you’re applying for a job with the Queen, spray the starch and follow the most formal conventions. If you’re doing something else, then do whatever it takes to do it well.

G: Oxford Comma, yes or no?

M: It depends. I write for a variety of publications. Some follow Associated Press Style, which is a serial comma killer.

Some don’t. When I write books, for example, I use the Oxford comma.

If I were in charge of the world, I suppose I’d urge use of the Oxford comma. It’s easy to point out cases where confusion arises without it. My favorite is the one that says, “We invited the strippers, JFK, and Stalin.” This is not the same as “We invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.” (For the record, I would pay many folded single dollar bills to watch JFK and Stalin strip together.) What’s more, we no longer live in an age where we’re communicating via telegraph, so we don’t need conserve characters in quite the same way we used to, except on Twitter.

That said, the opposite confusion can sometimes arise. Consider this: “For my sister, an orangutan, and Jerome…” It’s unclear whether the speaker’s sister is an orangutan.

This is why you have to pay attention to every sentence you write. Communicating what you mean in a way that other people can understand is the goal. (That and inventing time travel so we can all catch that hot Cold War stripper act.)

G: Why is good grammar important? Isn’t it enough that we all “kind of” understand each other?

M: Tell that to the person who wrote the contract between Rogers Communication and Atlantic Canada. One rogue comma ended up costing Rogers something like $1 million a year. Most of us won’t be in a situation like this, but any time you write a letter, a personal ad, a job application, a Facebook status post, or even a tweet, you’re putting yourself into the world for all to judge and potentially misunderstand. Just as you wouldn’t want to go outside with your pants only “kind of” zipped, you want to give yourself the best chance of making whatever connection you seek. It saves all sorts of heartache and embarrassment, not to mention the occasional heap of cash.

Did you find this interesting? Share this post with your friends!

---

Thank you, Martha! Happy National Grammar Day.

Curious to know what kind of grammar nerd you are? Take Grammarly’s quiz in honor of National Grammar Day.