> How are professionals expected to communicate with each other? Usually with empty platitudes to kick things off like "Hey! How's it going? How's the family? H

> How are professionals expected to communicate with each other? Usually with empty platitudes to kick things off like "Hey! How's it going? How's the family? How are you doing?" Messages are expected to be written across several coherent English sentences, neatly organized into paragraphs, finally with some sort of signature. In the programming world we refer to this as boilerplate. What is it that we are really trying to communicate? Usually a few short ideas that could be represented as bullet points, but that we need to fluff up with meaningless words so that we don't sound rude. Of course, this changes by culture and by language and is not applicable to many parts of the world, but it is definitely a thing in American English. Do the rest of you really do this? I can’t recall receiving any slack or emails with this sort of thing over the 25+ years I’ve been working in a business environment, even though all of them have been in American English. I certainly don’t use that sort of “boilerplate”. I just jump straight into what the topic is.