Does your work email have emojis in it? 🤔 You're better off just getting to the point.

We want to speak and write clearly and correctly, and we want people to receive our words in the spirit (and with the meaning!) with which we intend them, but some days it all feels so fraught – an endless parade of “whom am I about to offend?” – that we just want to keep altogether silent.

Alas, it doesn’t work that way.

Mindfulness in communication isn’t, I think, as hard as we sometimes think. It simply requires, well, mindfulness.

Question: Lately the younger folk I work with are littering their emails with emojis – not the ;-) and :-( of days gone by but real ones like 😂 and 😳 and even, you’ll pardon me, 🤮 – and gifs of Maureen McCormick saying “Sure, Jan” (I suppose I should be grateful they even know who "The Brady Bunch" were), and I’m feeling increasingly left behind, as if I’m typing my emails with a quill. Help?

What can we do?:A co-worker is always 'correcting' our grammar and spelling, making it wrong.

Answer: I recall, at the dawn of the email age, being chided by a superior for not addressing my addressee by name at the start of an email message and for not signing off with my own name at the end of a message – a redundancy that struck me as absurd, given that the name of the person I was addressing and my own name were certainly right up there in the To: and the From:, right by the subject line. (Always fill in the subject line, OK? No one wants to walk into a mystery email trap, and the Re: Re: Re: thing gets quickly tiresome.) I was told that I was coming across as brusque to the point of rudeness. What did I do? Well, I did what I was told, which is generally a wise thing to do with one’s superiors. And even now, more often than not, I’ll open up an email to a colleague with a little “Hi, So-and-So” (yes, with a comma between the “Hi” and the name, must we entirely abandon civilized practice?) and sign off with, at least, a “Yrs., B.” or some such.

Speaking as an Official Old (63, if you must know), I think that the best thing to do, 11 times out of 10, is to make emails as succinct, plainspoken and unadorable as is possible: Get to the point, and get you gone. An email is a conveyance of information, not a blog post. If it’s especially late in the day, or you’re feeling especially punchy, or particularly if you’re e-chatting with an intimate, sure, make with the youthspeak and the pictographs, if you’re so inclined. But as a rule, you’d do well to remember that a business communication should be at least reasonably businesslike. (I’m not advocating humorlessness. Sometimes a bit of joking lightheartedness is the only way to get people to pay attention to what you’re saying. On the other hand – and perhaps a subject for a different column – email is notoriously lacking in tone of voice, and one person’s joshing is another person’s how-dare-you.) Moreover, attempting to imitate the speech of colleagues considerably or at all younger than oneself is generally as good an idea as attempting to imitate the wardrobe of colleagues considerably or at all younger than oneself, amirite?

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And hey, here’s some bonus email advice, not about grammar or usage but simply about effective communication. I learned this a long time ago and put it into practice at first haltingly and somewhat stiltedly, but now it’s second nature. (“How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice.”) Anytime you’re about to let loose with a “Please don’t” or a “You shouldn’t” or even a trying-to-seem-fair “Let’s not,” see if you can translate the negative phrasing into something affirmative: “Next time, let’s,” “Here’s a thing we can try,” that sort of thing. You may think you’re not fooling anyone, and perhaps you’re not, but positive phrasing strikes the soul much better than scolding.

I know this as a person to whom people report, and I certainly know it as a person who reports to people. And not to get all woo-woo about it, but it can change not only the way you communicate but the way you feel inside.

Benjamin Dreyer is the managing editor and copy chief of the Random House division of Penguin Random House and author of the bestselling "Dreyer's English." Do you have grammar questions for him? Tweet him at @bcdreyer. Responses may show up in a future column.