Email Signature Quote
A quotation appended below a sender's name, functioning as a small personal banner.
The signature quotation is a survival from Usenet and early email culture, where a .sig file of four lines or fewer was etiquette. The convention persists in professional email, where a line of Seneca or Maya Angelou sits under the job title.
Its social function is signalling rather than argument. The quote tells recipients what the sender wants to be read as valuing — rigour, kindness, irreverence — in a channel where there is no other room for self-presentation.
It is also the single most efficient distribution channel for misattribution ever built. A signature line is copied into every reply in a thread, quoted onward, and reproduced without any source, which is exactly the environment in which unsourced quotations thrive.
Practical guidance: keep it to one line, mark it off with a separator, include the author's name, and check the attribution before it appears at the bottom of several thousand messages.
“-- Jane Okafor | Research Lead "The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago." — Chinese proverb”
Keep reading the glossary
Assigning a quote to the wrong person — the most common error in quotation.
The credit set below a block quotation, epigraph, or pull quote.
The daily-quotation format — calendar, newsletter, widget — and the accuracy problems it creates.
A short, motivational line — often quoted, often misattributed — offered as consolation, exhortation, or self-help.