Is it appropriate to add a postscript to an email? [closed]

Wikipedia says:

A postscript may be a sentence, a paragraph, or occasionally many paragraphs added to, often hastily and incidentally, after the signature of a letter or (sometimes) the main body of an essay or book.

When all letters were handwritten, and adding a new thought to the letter would have likely involved rewriting the entire letter, a postscript had obvious practicality. Now, however, one can just as easily add the thought to the main text.

I use a P.S. rather often in my emails, when the content of the P.S. is unrelated to the rest of the body of the message. For example, if I was writing two or three paragraphs about a database problem to a colleague, but I knew his wife had been recently released from the hospital, I might end the message with something like:

P.S. I hope your wife is doing better.

That's an easy way to make an abrupt transition to something unrelated to the rest of the message.

Such modern usage isn't driven by an inability to conveniently insert the text (which is easily done electronically) – it's more a matter of how much that closing thought is related to the rest of the message.

P.S. You know you can't believe everything you read on Wikipedia, right?

You seem to have answered your own question, but it's perhaps worth pointing out that in both email and conventional mail a postscript can be a consciously chosen device for drawing attention to what it contains. What might look like an afterthought to the reader might be a deliberate ploy by the writer.

I'm going to contradict the other answers by saying it would just look plain wrong to me.

Now, that's not to say it is necessarily a bad idea - we have two other answers that find it perfectly acceptable.

Logically, it's reasonable as the form came to mean "oh, and also" some time ago, so it would no more have to be after a letter was finished than a teamster would have to have a team of horses.

But it is still going to look wrong to me, and the chances are that I am not unique and there are other people out there who would think it looks wrong.

Of course, if you tried to satisfy everyone in this way, then you'd write nothing. There are times when being seen to follow "the rules" is more important than others, so perhaps it would be worth avoiding sometimes more than others.

I have used P.S., on and off, most of my life. I have never done so because I forgot something and had to add it after the fact. When I've used it, I've done so deliberately—specifically wanting the text to go at the end (and after my signature) rather than anywhere else.

So, for me, it's always been a matter of stylistic choice.

Karen Hertzberg expresses the same idea in the blog post "What PS Means and How to Use It Correctly in Your Email". (Note that the UK form, and that used by The Chicago Manual of Style, does not use periods between the capital letters.)

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.

I thought about this, and those statistics reflect my own reading habits. If I see a message that has a P.S. at the end, I tend to read that first—and then read the message itself afterward.