Something got me thinking today about encryption. Im aware of a number of paths on PCs, but not so much on Macs. What do people suggest for primarily file encryption. Thinking primarily of things like word documents that are letters of recommendation and the like. Also, what about email? Thanks for any suggestions.

Truecrypt is available for the Mac...

I'm going to second TrueCrypt. Not quite an industry standard, but an un-industry standard at the least. Your choice of AES-256, Serpent, Twofish, AES-Serpent, AES-Twofish-Serpent, and more.

And it is free.

Have you tried Mac OS's built-in FileVault feature? It encrypts your entire home directory with AES-128.

It is trivially easy to use and there is no significant performance hit. I have been encrypting my 15 GB home directory ever since the release of Mac OS 10.3, without any issues.

Neither product encrypts the entire drive. PGP is developing a Mac whole disk encryption product, not sure of when its coming out.

For the OP's intended use, encrypting just the home directory should be more than adequate, perhaps even overkill. Under most circumstances, encrypting an entire boot disk is unnecessary and even undesirable.

I should mention that Mac OS's built-in Disk Utility allows the creation of fixed or variable sized disk images with AES-128 or AES-256 encryption. These images may be placed anywhere on any disk, and once mounted, are visible as a volume in which any number of files or directories may be stored.

I also use the file encryption option built in to OS X. Encrypting the entire drive can be overkill and affect performance. I just have one directory labeled "private" where I keep things like financial records.

How to do it? Lots of info out there, but see articles from Apple and from Reed College.

As others have suggested, FileVault is a good means to protect your entire directory.
However, there is another option built into OSX. With DiskUtility you can create an encrypted disk image which mounts like like a drive on your desktop. If you create it as a "sparse image" it will grow as needed. Same security as filevault

As part of the open source MacFuse project you can also use EncFS (reccomend the gui version which is part of MacFusion) ... it uses stadard AES and can be read on windows or linux if need be. I use EncFS for my backups so that if I ever find myself without a Mac I can still get to the data.

GnuPGP can also be used to encrypt data in a very secure way, but frankly its more trouble than its worth.

TrueCrypt is indeed awesome and now that its crossplatform I think I'm going to give it another serious go.... but just wanted to point out some other options.