Tone Misinterpreted In Half Of All Emails
from the we-still-really-need-sarcasm-tags dept
Misinterpretations of emails have been around forever; email flame wars erupt at the slightest provocation. A recent study reports that the tone in email is misinterpreted 50 percent of the time. Furthermore, 90 percent of people think they've correctly intepreted the tone of emails they receive, making for a dangerous gap in communication. The lack of tonal and non-verbal cues have made email and IM a haven for misinterpreted statements and flame wars. The study attributes much of the misunderstanding to egocentrism, since readers have a difficult time "detaching themselves from their own perspective." Supposed email etiquette expert Nancy Flynn needs to check her own egotism. Flynn's statement that "People write absolutely, incredibly stupid things in company e-mails" could easily be tinder for a nice little flame war. Oh wait, maybe she didn't mean it that way...
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This is so incredibly true..
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Smily face lol
Get the point :*
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Re: No Subject Given (pass the blame)
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The Obvious Stated Obviously
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Email and IM tonality mishaps
She happens to be correct. I've worked for a few very large corporations as an IT contractor and I've seen some of the most amazingly inaccurate statements broadcast through company email. The many mistakes are: horrible grammer, mispelling (when client programs like Outlook, cc:mail, etc all have spell checkers), subject matter that is clearly inappropriate and just plain wrong. To make it worse than it already is, these inaccuracies could have been avoided by 5 minutes of research or just plain forethought.
Somehow, people have decided that proper conversational etiquette does not apply in the digital world. Perhaps this is because the participants of such conversations have never met. Perhaps these people have never learned proper conversational manner. Who knows? What I do know, however, is that people need to take a few minutes and consider what they are trying to say before they attempt to say it.
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2 centz
* the exception of course is sarcasm which is almost always lost in text
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No Subject Given
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Cues like emoticons and XML
All this is why cues like emoticons and XML are important in the textual medium. A ;-) at the end of the joke will go a long way for preventing a flame war. And XML tags are a very eXtensible way of conveying the meaning:
<sarcasm>Yeah, that's really impressive.</sarcasm>
<tongue location="cheek">It might help if you dipped your nose in the mustard.</tongue>
<pat person="self" organ="back">I did it in just three minutes!</pat>
<advocate client="Devil">They've succeeded in the market because their products are good.</advocate>
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Miscommunication the norm
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50% of sociologists misinterpret their own researc
It's no wonder they were right 50% of the time. It's a coin flip.
All the gobbledegook about egocentrism reveals more about the biases of the researcher than about the nature of e-mail.
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suspended from work for 5 daysfrom email misinterp
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loan offer
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email tone
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