"That is all."

You've just composed the perfect e-mail, and you're about to send it. Maybe you've explained to an estranged friend that no, it had nothing to do with the Queen Live Killers album. Maybe you've outlined a brilliant proposal for leveraging your e-business connections in the dynamic infosphere. Maybe you've written a smashing party announcement.

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But you have to end the communication first. And there's no good way to do it. "Thanks" isn't going to cut it in every case; it may even make you sound needlessly sarcastic. "Bye" is even worse. You could just end the e-mail right there, but that might sound a bit abrupt, especially if the last sentence is something like, "I mean, granted, 'Dynamite with a laser beam, guaranteed to blow your mind, any time' is quite a deft turn of phrase."

You realize that there's got to be an all-purpose way to end a piece of correspondence that makes you sound both careless and reasoned, voluble and down to earth. You're bemused and yet you're taking it all in stride. That is all.

That is all ... that's it! You've got it, a three-word phrase that literally means that the transmission is done and yet connotes so much more. You hit return, type it, hit return again, sign the e-mail, and send.

At least, I assume that's probably what went through the mind of the first person who ended an e-mail this way. Now, though, it's become almost a reflex, the preferred way to end any piece of informal writing. E-mail users must have gotten the idea that, since "That is all" is so often used to end wacky, whimsical missives, some of these qualities must transfer onto any piece of writing that makes use of the phrase. So you'd get stuff like, "It has come to my attention that some employees on this floor have begun to leave their unwashed coffee cups in the sink at the end of the day. I would very much appreciate it if, in the future, all employees would remember to wash their dishes before leaving for the day.

"That is all."

Wacky. Whimsical. Right.

How do I know that it's become the knee-jerk response to conclusion brain freeze? Well, I've caught myself doing it. And through extensive research, I've discovered two places where it crops up regularly: McSweeney's and my saved e-mails.

If something's in McSweeney's, that's a pretty good indicator that it's hip, right? "That is all" is used in the way I've described in no fewer than four McSweeney's pieces, according to an Altavista search (counting one "That is all for now.") That's not including one from last Friday, in which "That is all" is the penultimate sentence. And wunderkind McSweeney's chronicler Gary Baum details an e-mail correspondence with friend of McSweeney's Zadie Smith in which she reveals a propensity for the all-purpose closer. It's become the "Show me the money" of the twentysomething literati. If Keats wrote for McSweeney's, his editor would probably tell him, "This is mostly good, but the 'all ye know on earth' stuff is a little much. How about this: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all.'"

But McSweeney's didn't invent, or even take the initiative in creating, "That is all." A search through 153 e-mails I've saved from 1998 reveals five instances of it — that's about one out of every 30. You could argue that I'm somehow more likely to save messages that end in "That is all," but, to use a no-more-played-out three-word expression, don't go there.

So what do you do when you feel the urge to close an e-mail this way? Well, here are several fresh alternatives:

• Play with "That is all." By doing this, you're acknowledging it's a cliche — and isn't self-awareness what our favorite expression is all about? You could do "All is that," "All that is" or "Is that all?"
• "Take on the day." Why let Dr. Laura have a monopoly on this underrated little phrase?
• "END" No period, all caps. Organizing your thoughts with fake HTML tags is itself old, but you can still get away with BASIC or
• "return;" if you like C better.
• Write a coherent message that has a logical closing sentence. Okay, this one might actually be a little played out, having been a favorite tactic of essayists from Montaigne to Orwell. But it's been out of style long enough that it's due for a comeback.