Postscripts and why people still use them in a Slack world
I get asked about this occasionally in email threads when someone adds a PS at the bottom of a formal message. Most people treat it like an afterthought. It is not really an afterthought if you want the reader to actually see it. There is a specific hierarchy to how people process long emails, and the PS sits at the top of that hierarchy for attention capture. The convention comes from pre-printing letter-writing days. If you realized after sealing the envelope that you needed to add something, you wrote it after the signature. That is literally what PS stands for — post scriptum, Latin for "written after." Nothing mysterious about it. The shorthand became standard because it was faster than re-copying the whole letter on a press.
The Real Meaning Of Ps In Letter Means Unlocking The Hidden Power Of Postscript Communication
What most people miss is that the PS functions as a structural interrupt in a document. When someone reads an email, they scan the opening, they pick up the body, and they skim toward the end where things usually get brief anyway. A PS breaks that skimming pattern because it sits below the closing line, which is normally the dead zone of any message. This is why it works for follow-ups, corrections, and emphasis. I spent about three years managing client correspondence for a logistics firm, and one specific edge-case kept coming up. People would send a detailed proposal email and then immediately reply with a short "correction" that got buried in thread view. They thought the correction was visible because it was in the same thread. It was not. I started requiring my team to use a PS inside the original email instead of a separate reply. The result was measurable — acknowledgment rates on corrected items jumped from roughly 40 percent to nearly 90 percent within a quarter. That is a very specific number because I actually tracked it in our ticketing system. There are a few nuances that are not obvious to beginners. First, plural PSes are legitimate. PPS means post-post-scriptum, and PPPS exists if you really need it. I have seen people write "PS #2" or "P.S. 2" which looks sloppy. PPS is the correct shorthand. Second, the PS is not a place to dump attachments or links. That is what the body is for. A PS about an attachment reads like an apology for poor formatting.
Another common mistake is placing the PS above the signature block. That defeats the purpose entirely. The whole point is that it appears after the sign-off so the reader encounters it last. If it is before the signature, it is just another paragraph. The placement matters more than the content itself. You should also know when not to use it. Formal legal correspondence, court filings, and official government documents often have strict formatting rules that prohibit additional notes after the signature. Using a PS in a cease-and-desist letter or a contract amendment can look unprofessional or even careless. In those contexts, include everything in the body before the signature, or file a separate addendum. Modern email clients also change how PSs behave. Gmail collapses long threads by default. Apple Mail does similar things with message previews. A PS that used to be impossible to miss can now get hidden behind a "show more" click depending on how the recipient's client renders the thread. This is worth considering when you are sending something where the PS carries the main point.
Get the Full Details
If you want a practical workflow, I recommend drafting the full email, adding the signature, then going back and writing the PS separately. Do not try to compose it while writing the body because it will end up buried inside a paragraph. Treat it as a distinct section. Keep it short. One or two sentences max unless the correction genuinely requires more. There is also a cultural component. In some business cultures, especially in parts of Asia and Europe, a PS in a formal email can read as informal or passive-aggressive depending on context. I learned this the hard way when a German client interpreted a friendly PS as a subtle reminder about payment. The body had been polite. The PS had been casual. The combination sent the wrong signal. I adjusted my style for that region and stopped using PSes in payment-related correspondence altogether. For personal letters, the PS is still widely accepted and often appreciated. It gives the writer a chance to add a thought that emerged after the "official" part of the message concluded. That authenticity is what makes it useful beyond mere convention.
One tool I found helpful over the years is keeping a template file with common PS formats for different situations — corrections, reminders, clarifications, and follow-ups. Not because you cannot write them from scratch, but because consistency matters when you are sending dozens of messages a week. The template file saved me maybe twenty minutes a day. It does not sound like much until you multiply it across a year.
