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Why Emails Are Misunderstood
werdna writes "The Christian Science Monitor has a piece on why it's so easy to misinterpret emails.
From the article: 'First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.'"
From that article, I agree: "If you're vulnerable to this kind of unintentional prejudice, pick up the phone: People are much less likely to prejudge after communicating by phone than they are after receiving an e-mail."
But, from the article, I disagree: "E-mail tends to be short and to the point." While e-mail can be short and sweet, I've found it to be all over the map. I've seen e-mail as a freebie for people who expound ad nauseum, and it's (e-mail) ubiquitous presence multiplies the wandering missives. Short and sweet is more typical in business settings (though I've seen epics there, too.)
Consider the classic following example. Read each sentence out loud, with emphasis on the bolded word.
I've fallen prey to this. It's too easy to project either your mood, or your opinion, etc. into an e-mail's text and consequently misinterpret the senders intent, message, sometimes to the extent you've flipped their intent 180 degrees.
Most of the time this is just a nuisance. Sometimes it can be amusing -- a story to share over beer (free).
It is worth exercising due care though to avoid escalations and huge misunderstandings sometimes creating hard feelings, and in more extreme cases damaging relationships. I learned from a few hard lessons, if after a few exchanges a dialog became testy and began escalation, I'd intervene on behalf of myself and the correspondent by curtailing the e-mail until a quick chat on the phone could reset the tone. That almost always worked.
(While some use some convention to help make tone and such more clear (e.g., *word*, emoticons, ALL-CAPS, etc.), I've found that to help marginally, and in some cases inflame a tense dialog further when that was not the intent.)
:p
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
is that some are from Nigerian royalty.
It's really hard to read their broken English. I spent at least 3 days emailing back and forth before I figured how to send them $10000 from my bank account.
Now, I'm just waiting for the cash to roll in......
AVOID all caps. It is ambiguous.
_I_ figured this out for myself, surely after many before me...BREAKING NEWS: the same applies for text messging and text IM!!
...all cock-blockery aside...
I'm pretty sure that they are so misunderstood because they are composed by such gauche and uneducated knuckle draggers. But it could be because the illiterate morons are allowed to operate computers in the first place.
I'm pretty sure...
People are perfectly capable of writing letters without using smilies and stupid acronyms. At least they used to be able, god knows that the text generation is up to. The problem isn't that there's anything wrong with email as a form of communiation is that people don't think or re-read their mails before hitting send. If you had to click 'send', and then re-read your mail and click 'send' again ten minutes later, there'd be far fewer misunderstandings and a great deal less internet drama.
It is more than that. English is ambigous to begin with. The following sentence has at least 3 interpretations:
"Flying airplanes can be dangerous".
or
"The horse that raced past the barn fell."
That's why I usually begin my letters with:
FU U F'ing F'er.
Such a versitile word. And no confusion!
This is why I think people "invented" emoticons :)
:(
:`(
:/
:D
Or am I mad at those people >:(
All these thoughts make me sad
and cry
Who can be indifferent about these things
I would be ecstatic
Ah well, back to my nintendo (>',')>
This is the sig that says NI (again)
... is keep e-mails short and to the point, avoid telling jokes, even the old classic "a horse goes into a bar, barman says "what's with the long face?"" because it might be misunderstood... or they might not like your joke (even though it's the best joke ever)
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Email is simply a sped-up version of the old fashion hand-written letter. Yes, you coul tell some of the emotions fo the person by the handwriting, but really words on a page are not new, and the issues with it are stil the same. The only new dimension of it is the speed and ease with which it is passed from one person to the next.
n00bz.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
Bullocks is the plural of Bull -- what you probably meant was Bollocks, which are the bully parts of a single bull.
The article is really good. (Whoa, I read it!). It's difficult to communicate over written medium. But given time, you can become better at it. I actually wrote a customer this morning and used the terms "woops I goofed!". He have built prior rapport, over the phone.
Email should be one communication tool in your toolbelt. Not the only one. Re-read your email before you send it. See if you can understand it, reading it from an objective point of view. I'm sure editors and authors do this all the time.
I typically put a bunch of garbage in an email, re-read it, and throw 90% of the garbage out, and am left with two short sentences that get my point across. When I ramble on and on and on, people get bored. (like this post).
FLR
They make for a nice way of expressing tone and intent. ^_^
...Yeah.
Email is just like IM chat when I am emailing or chating with a friend or coworker I know personaly I often think to myself "this doesn't sound like so and so". When it is someone I don't know personaly that wierdness is not there... because I have no baseline to compare to.
One thing I do find helps is adding headers and footers to the emails even if it is a quick "good morning So and so" or a "Thanks," before my auto signature(I am not in sales but the same principals used there can apply to many proffesonal settings). The only time I really don't look for things like that is when I know that the person is on a blackberry, and then being overly breif can be forgiven.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Ever since I began using email, have I known that email messages lack emotion and are easy to misinterpret.
Not only that, but sometimes a simple typo causes the ENTIRE message to be utterly wrong. I've left out a crucial "not" more than a few times.
Randy - mustbehardupforarticles
Somewhat ironically, you should have been more specific. English phrases are ambiguous, not the language itself. When speaking, people make up for it with intonation, where other languages would make distinctions using word order and choice. It's the reason I tend to use a lot if italicised words in my typing.
I could have made this very same statement and I am not an expert. I see it all the time when I am using email and IM. Are people that stupid? Oh wait, stupid question....
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. 1234567890
Just like you did, e.g. make the words that need emphasis bold , etc..
"Houston, we have a problem."
RTFA and all I have to say that it's been VERY rare that I misunderstood an email. Smileys and such are a very common way people express their feelings and in business correspondence the tone is pretty much standardized. I actually believe that in spoken language one can misunderstand the other's message as well, happens all the time, right? Some day I might feel a bit down and people might interpret my message in a different light. Anyway, I think there's not much news here - besides, what are we going to do - stop sending emails? ;-)
Sometimes the lack of social cues is a good thing. There have been times when I've been irritated at someone and sent them email and realized upon getting their response that they didn't get my irritation - it didn't come across in email, and this was actually a positive thing. Obviously that's a limited case, but it does happen too.
"People Suck at Spotting Phishing" that is "Why Emails Are Misunderstood".
True, natrually. Even Slashdot posts can contain language and diction which seems haughty and arrogant. It is like the poster is trying to "educate" the less informed. Some people even make alot of spelling mistakes and get flamed for it, and we typically assume that these people are poor-intentioned, even when they use ill expressions to correct the original poster.
Short of writing like Charles Dickens I don't anticipate a solution any time soon. (Webcam?)
from the Christian Science Monitor. It's like they're right there where the action is, except 16 years later.
They had articles about this back during the Usenet days. And this is news how?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Nothing has more urgency than the mouth. Many a regretful statement has passed through mine. And sarcastic and deadpan humor often goes misunderstood, even when my face is in the room. I want some objective evidence email is any worse than what came before. The email is so misunderstood seems like more favor-of-the-month journalism.
Wait, I screwed that up. My point is that the language makes up for deficiencies in one thing by promoting another thing, and intonation is as much a part of "English" as phrases and words.
OK how about this: "Written English is ambigous" ??
What makes understanding (and meaning) problematic in e-mail is also well known in AI research. Language, while syntactically specific, grants latitude and license in rule usage and interpretation/extraction of meaning.
A favorite example of the nuance of true interpretation:
The graphic on the side says that perhaps just over 1/2 of emails are understood + interpreted correctly, compared with 3/4 of phone calls. So about 1 in 4 communications by phone are misunderstood? It's no wonder we are all so stressed out, if 25% of the time you're on the phone with someone, they don't get what you're talking about!
stuff |
This exact piece of research comes out every year and it is just as earth shattering every time. Thank god that they got it out before the middle of the year and I didn't suffer any anxiety from the delay of the release of this important piece of research. Perhaps since this is written medium did you get the sarcasm?
Ok kids we got this, yes this issue spawned emoticons, can we move on to more important things like Gizmodo execs and Enzo's cut in half.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Maybe email clients should have a 'Preview' button too, eh?
It happens in RL, too, you know. Especially if you are talking with people of the opposite sex. In fact, it happens all the time.
wElCoMe bAcK tO 1995.
:) :->
Glad to see christian science is keeping up with the times - I found this article very useful. Do you think that it also applies to world wide web chat rooms like Slashdot?
You're right in that substitutes for tone of voice and facial expressions are creeping into the language in the form of emoticons etc, but I wonder how long it will be before emoticons are considered to be a proper part of natural languages in the same way that normal punctuation is?
The constructed language Lojban takes this a step further, with attitudinal indicators that are the rough analogue of emoticons. For instance, .u'i in a sentence indicates that you are amused. However attitudinal indicators are actually a part of the language proper, and are even spoken out loud.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
You're missing an "s". It should be:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890
What is email? It is simply text. It is little different than books, newspapers, magazines, letters etcetera. Yet these other media don't seem to have nearly as much trouble being understood. This is because the difficulty and cost in producing these media better restrict access to those that are better educated.
Better educated people are able to write and clearly convey a point or concept or emotion. They are also able to properly judge when it is suitable to use a one line message and when it is necessary to write three pages of text to accurately convey a point.
But, the masses that use email seem to lack this basic level of literacy. They generally lack discipline as well as writing ability. Sadly, the problem is only getting worse as instant messaging and SMS text messaging invade popular culture and further erode basic literacy.
werdna writes "The Christian Science Monitor has a piece on
Christianity and science. Not exactly the happiest of bedfellows, historically speaking.. I'm not saying this is fud, but it is a pretty obvious point to be making (hence the duh tag I suppose, with which I have to agree..)
g.
Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.
Awhile ago I was working on a project with a few freelancers. It worked out well, so we continued working together. Everything was roses until we ended up in a really ugly project and the "blame game" started. A day later, this wonderful "team" of ours was nothing but a ghost. The resulting flamewar would make even the most persistant /. troll blush.
Freelancer != Employee
Email/IM != Meeting
I'm not sure why, but it would seem as though people *need* to be forced together into horrible and painful meetings when the time comes to make "tough choices".
My mistake was in allowing my own anti-meeting bias to cloud my better judgement.
barack to the future?
Actually, I've found most emails correctly carry the emotion of the sender - particularly if their very mad or frustrated.
The problem is people feel much freer to express extreme anger, curse, and belittle people over email than they ever would in real life.
Look at many of the posts to this website - while some people really are complete assholes, I'd bet a significant fraction of the posts here would NEVER be said in a face-to-face conversation (particularly if someone dares to actually compliment Windows). That's precisely because emails correctly convey emotion that most people won't express in real life.
I had a girlfriend once [no really], that would want to fight over email sometimes. We'd be talking using MSN Messenger, then suddenly if I said something that pissed her off, she'd sign out and start emailing me instead. It was the most annoying thing in the world, especially since Hotmail was broken and it'd take hours sometimes for one of my replies to find its way back to her inbox.
It was also impossible to end the fight over email, as anything I said always lead to more problems, until I could talk her into getting back on MSN Messenger to talk with me either by messages, or through a voice-call.
I think email is easy to hide behind and perfect for chewing someone out, but doesn't have a warm fuzzy side to it at all.
Oh You POS
We have a rule at work. If you are going to say something nice, feel free to send an email. If you are going to send something critical or mean, pick up the phone or walk over to the persons desk.
I'm having a hard time determining if this article was written to be informative, cautionary, or sarcastic.
The problem is not with the lack of nonverbal cues, but with people who are easily offended. Such people simply assume that everyone hates them and everything else in the world. Obviously, such mindset leads to interpreting every sentence in the worst possible way, seeing insult in place of irony, personal attacks in passionate arguments, and hatred in the omission of flattery. The email world would be a far friendlier place if everyone assumed goodwill in correspondence instead, choosing to interpret every statement as if it came from a dearest friend, trustworthy and kind, if perhaps sometimes absent-minded. The best way to become friends with any man is simply to start treating him like one.
This is a situation where, strangely enough, emoticons really help. For example, I have a fairly good, sarcastic sense of humor -- very difficult to read in emails. Let's say the "money" example had to do with a few bucks stolen from petty cash.
:P
I didn't steal the money.
vs.
I didn't steal the money.
The second conveys a kind of shrugged shoulders, palms upward vibe. It not only says that I didn't steal the money, but also conveys my view that stealing a few bucks is a relatively minor problem and we should move on. Without the emoticon there, that would've been a very difficult sentiment to convey succinctly (I guess I could go into a paragraph explaining my viewpoint, like I did here, but that would be rather onerous).
Unfortunately, emoticons aren't considered "professional", and that leads to a lot of misguided cues. I kind of wish they were more accepted in a business setting.
You insensitive clod!
In other words, that's not really news, is it?
You just got troll'd!
Those emails that are not understood probably lack the correct use of the correct words coupled with the saintly praise of patience.
The things covered in the article are completely new to me. Really! I mean, like, the reason you can be misunderstood over e-mail is the lack of voice expressions and face expression?
Shit, being a scientist is sure a hell of a complex job.
I've never EVER read than in thousands of other articles throughout the last 10 years, and it's totally not common knowledge. Honest!
My subject line says it all. Good punctuation and proper capitalization go a long way in preventing the following sentence:
"Go help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
from turning into something much darker.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
they want their article back. While we're at it, let's get Ric Romero right on this!
sheesh.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
I have often wondered if much of the difficulty which arises in written communcation (email, IM, etc.) is due to a general degredation in the vocabulary of the populous. I beleive that my own vocabulary is just slightly above what may have been the average for people born a generation or two before me, but I think that it is vastly larger than that of many of my 20-something peers. Although there may be many causes of this, such as a general decline in literacy, a lack of focus on grammar in schools, MTV, a general trend toward a more streamlined form of english , a conspiracy run by the dental floss industry, Mercury in retrograde-whatever. The result is that by having a smaller vocabulary, the effective resolution of the language is degredated. The more subtle details of language are lost like converting a true color PNG to an 8 bit gif.
Compare the letters written by- for example- soldiers during the civil war with letters that are written today. It should be a safe assumption that the regular infantry whos letters are oft cited from that era would be average for the time period. In both cases, we are dealing with a form of written communication. While it is perhaps true that letters written before the advent of email were subject to more revisions and were generally more well thought out, the fact is that there is a much larger breadth of vocabulary used in them. I think that if people today were willing and able to use a larger vocabulary they would be able to correspond more effectively and avoid misunderstandings.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Any mention of lojban rocks! mo vi do.
During a Nonverbal communication class while an undergrad I did significant research into both the literature and previously performed experiments on this subjecte and found an alltogether different result. I posted my paper at:t:
s /131-Remediation-Of-Nonverbals-In-Computer-Mediate d.html
http://www.moderndemagogue.com/index.php?/archive
The introductory paragraph: Non-verbal communication is undeniably a core part of human interaction. The slightest nod of the head, blink of an eyelid, or ill-timed cough can, when analyzed in context, convey the truth of meaning in a conversation. However, today's most utilized communication tool seems to simply deny access to all traditional non-verbal devices. The Internet, not inherently as a medium, but in its current manifestation, with its current crop of computer-mediated communication (CMC) utilities forces use of the written word as the primary medium of rapid communication. Such absence of vocal cues, modifiers, and adaptors utterly eliminates the 63% (or more) of information conveyed in a normal, Face-to-Face (FtF) situation. Such an absence would seem to preclude the Internet and CMC as a forum for social communication and emotional interaction. However, this is a false assumption. A completely independent set of replacement nonverbal behaviors have developed in order to augment the perceived sterility of text-only communication. Furthermore, research demonstrates that not only may social and emotional relationships develop through CMC, but now tend to be the primary utilizations of such technologies. These results arise from a multitude of studies focusing on the intrinsic nature of human communication and the specific manner in which users redefine NVC for the context of this constantly evolving low media richness environment.
Simply, humans have adapted admirably to the demands of this new method of communication
Yes, dear friend, let's all hold hands and sing. Wouldn't the world be so much nicer if every smiled and hugged their children? Thank you for the eloquent and insightful post.
;>
It so refreshing to read posts that aren't condescending or self-righteous.
Damn - now what's the right emoticon for sarcasm?
How about "Poorly written English is ambiguous."
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I am certainly not an expert on languages but I do agree with your statement. Moreover, I think your statment will apply to any language. I can add Russian to the list. Any others?
Couldn't someone just bold the text in the email like this?
Hmmm, yeah, that probably needs some smilies and html markup to make the emotional context clearer.
Best Slashdot Co
Books and Newspapers are written by people who are supposed to be good at communications, but often the articles are confusing, misleading, uninformed, biased or just plain wrong.
The truth is that people are doing the communicating and people are flawed. I believe emails can have all of the flaws of people, just amplified because they believe email to be an informal communication. Coupled with the reasons mentioned in RFA, emails are certainly misunderstood, but not necessarily more so than say a letter.
It's because the sender often thinks he's included an eyeball screen-capture to accompany the email so you know exactly what he's looking at. Or maybe he thinks he's added a zip file containing a telepathic mind-dump so you have a clue what's rattling around inside his brain.
Emails are most often misunderstood because the sender hasn't a bloody clue as to how to write one.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
the problem with your case is illustrated in your example, symbols are even worse than words when it comes to multiple interpretations.
;)
does that mean I'm being sarcastic, paternalistic, or just indicating you need to take my comment with a grain of salt ?
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
How many stories that say exactly this same thing have we seen in the past 10 years? Stuff that matter? I don't think so.
In my experience, the problem isn't so much tied to the limitations of communicating via text. It's more a problem of people being very poor at written communication. Most people don't use good grammar and can't spell. They can't type very well either. All these factors conspire to make the whole experience of trying to communicate via any form of text cumbersome and frustrating, and that's assuming they even have a desire to communicate effectively to start with. The chances of someone writing an e-mail well enough to get their point across without a misunderstanding are slim to none.
I use a lot of smilies and exclamation points to communicate, so I've never had the problem, but I can see how a lesser writer could.
But maybe your uncle is a vet...
It seems to me that one of the main reasons people misinterpret email content is because the author of said email doesn't know how to write well enough to make themselves understood.
Written language - the ones I'm familiar with, anyway - contains plenty of constructions for getting just about any meaning across, when used properly.
Of course, there are also problems on the reader's end. Many people aren't readers - they don't read for pleasure, don't read newspapers, and don't read for professional purposes. Without a lot of experience reading, it's going to be a difficult thing to do well in any format.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Anyway, it's certainly another good example of how email (or in this case, postings) can be misunderstood.
why my chatroom sex partners always break up with me?
mr smith...
these accusations are an outrage... I didnt steal the money... talk with bob from accounting...
toodles...
ted from the mailroom
See? Clear as a bell. Obviously, ted didn't steal the money. And those ellipses help each sentence flow smoothly into the next.
Bonus suggestion: If an entire message is important, JUST CAPITALIZE EVERY LETTER. THAT WILL FORCE PEOPLE TO LISTEN AND MAKE YOU SOUND IMPORTANT.
The conclusions shown in the summary are given as causes of the misunderstandings (anecodotal and experimental) in TFA. I disagree somewhat. Though it is in the main logical to conclude that the problem lies in e-mail not properly conveying all the nuances of human verbal communication, I think the problem is more with the people than inherent limitations in the medium -- in other words, we have to mature into e-mail, it doesn't need to expand for us.*
* The article itself basically confirms this by using extant prejudices and other such things as examples of how miscommunications occur -- these are things that we have to work to eliminate, not treat as givens and create solutions around!
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
It wants it article back.
I just happen to be very fashion-concious, but for some reason ....
"I didn't steal that money" would probably be a better example.
Perhaps you could just be a bit more eloquent in your writing, thus removing the need for emoticons. :P
Interestingly, I'd interpret your smiley that you actually did steal the money, but believe I cannot prove it (why else would you poke your tongue out at me?). Or, depending on the situation (maybe I got some disadvantage due to that suspect) that you actually didn't take the money, but intended me to believe that you did, and I fell for it.
In any case, this smiley after that sentence would inevitably give me a very negative impression about you.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Or, in this case, bad punctuation.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Read each sentence out loud, with emphasis on the bolded word. ...
* I didn't steal the money.
I can only imagine thousands of cubical dwellers reaction to their neighbor muttering "I didn't steal the money" over and over again.
Tommarow, lets go for "I won't kill the president today".
I've been using email since the early '90s, and this was common knowledge back then. How is it news today?
The problem isn't the langauge, the problem is the person doing the writing. You can't expect to write the same way you speak, it just doesn't work.
People tend to use the same style in email as they do in some other forms of electronic communicatin, such as IM, IRC, or the never-ending falmewar that is Usenet. It's not. What TFA is about, is business communication. The same care should go into your email to a business associate as into a physical snail mail letter to the same person. After all, it may get shared on his end, it may get printed out and shoved in a contract file, or even shown to a jury. In the latter instance, do you want it to be something your attorney holds up to show how you are the good guy, or something the other sides attorney is only too glad to have the jury read.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
of using tags in my IM conversations and emails. My personal favorite is Seems to work for me.
One thing I find that helps is mroe lines per screen. It helps keep the whole thing in prespective, and not jump to immediate conclusions while looking to scroll. A second thing that helps is the use of emoticons [smileys]. When I first saw'em, I thought they were needly frippery. An affectation. Now I see they are just as important as punctuation. They convey mode and serve as humor/sarcasm markers in the absense of long text that serves the same purpose in conventional articles and letters.
...most folks don't understand emails because the quality of people's emails in regards to correct grammar and spelling has detiorated to the point that deciphering a run-of-the-mill business email requires a Naval crytography certificate of completion. I'm not an English nut, but GEEZUZ people, a little proofread scan before you hit "send" won't make you miss that deadline.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
....could be a career ending joke to put in your email.
In most emails, especially those I get from an international research team, I find that two other missing elements in emails are:
1. Context - frequently, someone sends off an email, but the subject line references some other topic - they replied to you and changed the topic, but did not change the subject line Re: UDS Extract 1.2 forms to what it should be Kramer SNP Project Request, or they bury the context change in the middle of the text without warning - starting with one topic thanks for fixing the forms and then three paragraphs in, in what you thought was a routine thanks for all the fish email, you realize they had dropped in the fact that Earth is about to be destroyed and you need to appeal it in the subbasement filing cabinet last week but you haven't developed time travel.
2. Replies - sometimes they have all these nested replies - my mother is famous for this, and then halfway down what just looks like reply re reply re reply re reply there's a lone sentence typed in that say oh, the car stopped working so we're spending your inheritence on taxi service but we can't be bothered having the car repaired since we must get on the internet now that we're retired.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Firts of all, CHRISTIAN and SCIENCE dont fit ! One is a religion based on faith and other is... well science based on observation. Chritian and science dont make sense in a same sentence. Second, the point of this article is that written correspondance is a poor method of communication. Hum... written letter has proven well for many many centuries.
"Insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." - Nietzsche
it's because you don't know how to write
the education system in this country has been persistently diminished by 30 years of right-wing anti-tax politicking
logic, critical thinking, and communication skills are denigrated in favor of the ability to make change, cook a burger, and give a massage
why does a servant class need to write letters anyway?
When speaking, people make up for it with intonation, where other languages would make distinctions using word order and choice.
Actually, from people I've spoken to about language, English is not very inflection-dependant, if you speak it correctly. A language like Mandarin relies much, much more heavily on the way a word is said. The only reason most English speakers have trouble making themselves understood through email is that they can't actually speak the language properly.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Right, and if you're a Brit... the tone in which a statement is delivered will determine the meaning.
"you (bloody) little rat-bag" (said w/a smile)
vs.
"You (bloody) little rat-bag" (said w/menace)
The only people whose emails are misunderstood are those who can't write well.
How is this much different from getting a letter via snail mail? Same thing: if you know someone, you can interpret what they're writing; if you don't know them, it's much harder.
And even in a medium where you can hear or see the person, they can still deceive you or you can misinterpret their facial expressions. Communications between two or more people is not something cut-and-dried.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I helped my uncle Jack off the horse
v/s
I helped my uncle jack off the horse
First and foremost, [e-]mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice.
:) Most people think clarity in writing is some natural gift they have but it isn't. Also, there are times - quite frequently - when one has to formulate the same idea differently when it needs to be written down, than when it has to be spoken out loud. One needs much practice to be really good and clear. Just think: how much time do you spend speaking, and how much with writing in let's say 10 years ?
That hasn't been much of a problem for some hundred years of mailing. Writing is not a lesser form of communication, it's just different. With enough practice, one can make oneself understood, the way one wants to be understood, not just saying something and hoping the target will be on the same frequency
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I am currently taking a class in American Sign Language.
They use a surprising number of facial cues to go with the hand signing. For example furrowed eye brows for an open-ended question. This is on top of the regular body langauge, which we are encouraged to include.
This helps to deal with the lack of voice tone.
As someone that has unintentinoally come off sounding abrasive via email, I think that the real problem is the speed (as mentioned in the article). Often people want to communicate fast so emails get written without much thought as compared to hand written snailmail letters.
In my opinion the proper way to deal with this is to be more explicit and accept the fact that it will take you 1 minute to write the email instead of 20 seconds.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
One of the worst thing I see in corporate settings is email threads between half a dozen people or more in which the gist of the conversation has been totally lost. Some participant's have usually stopped responding at this point because the conversation has gotten sidetracked and no one really remembers what the original issue was.
Sometimes It is possible to refocus the group and get back to the point by CHANGING the subject line from something like: RE: re: re: re Big Problem
to:
Server parameter changes needed (or whatever)
And then IN THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE MESSAGE BODY simply, succinctly stating the problem and the decision which must be made and possible decision factors.
Usually I have to write this AFTER I have made the more technical analysis, which may be a little further down in the email.
If this first sentence is clear and unambigous (and not casting any blame or making judgements, etc) then you have some chance of re-engaging the principals. Everyone needs clear, simple explanations of technical issues.
-What's the speed of Dark?
I find that most people who hide behind email are typically small-minded douchebags.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
1) modern (il)literacy
2) the immediacy of modern communications
These combine to make sloppy, poorly constructed communication commonplace and, frankly, good enough in most situations. In the days (e.g. 1800s) when a letter would take a month (or three... or a year) to travel some great distance to get "back home," people would carefully construct letters to say precisely what they thought. A "follow-up call" wasn't an option. And people communicated news and events primarily by written word and by word of mouth -- the visual medium hadn't spoiled/replaced their command of language. Read the Letters Home of Civil War soldiers; thoughtful, tender, moving accounts of the world around them explained to a loved one far away. Ken Burns' Civil War series read several, there are hundreds more at the national archives and museums in most moderate-sized towns have a collection in their historical archives.
The problem may be our beloved technology. Numerous studies shown a decrease in working vocabulary in the past two centuries. Sure, we now have lots of buzzwords and technical jargon (typically nouns) but the power of English lies in the adjectives (borrowed heavily and adapted from numerous other languages.) Read a random small-town newspaper from the mid-1800's. Compare to yesterday's newsprint. The latter is written as if for a child. The former will find most college graduates reaching for a dictionary.
"You can never put too much water into a nuclear reactor."
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Where are all you athiests? This place is usually full of them. The reason I'm looking for athiests (although I'm not one) is because they usually put faith down with "it's not provable."
OK, well this is provable, but I didn't see any mention in the story of any scientific research into the subject. Later on it says the guy studies negotiation, hardly what I'd call "science." Note not all communication is negotiation. In fact, most isn't, it's informative. I ask you something, you answer. I give an opinion, you agree or disagree and explain why I'm an idiot. Or I simply write to keep in touch. In fact, I don't think I've ever negotiated anything over email!
First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well.
Bullshit. People have been writing letters for thousands of years. And verbal language lacks clues to meaning that the written word has (although you wouldn't know it from the average newspaper headline or slashdot post). For example, I might be talking about a horse, and you might think I'm talking about whores. Windy=Wednesday, etc. (Yes, I'm getting old.)
I can't see your face on my phone, either. Plus I get static, dropouts, and all kinds of crap that make it hard even for a young person to understand (I ditched my landline years ago).
The problems I have with email (and slashdot posts) are that you damned kids can't spell! Did you lose your dog, or did you loose your dog? Two different verbs with two different meanings. If you spell "whores" as "horse," how in the hell am I supposed to know WTF you're talking about? "Your bad" has a completely different meaning than "you're bad." Which brings us to-
Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness.
Well, that's just plain laziness, kids. "Back in the day" when we made a typo we had to retype the whole thing (or X it out and start over). That's if we were even typing; most of us wrote in longhand. Try to get much info from MY bad handwriting!
Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.
I don't see how lack of rapport leads to miscommunication, could one of you kind souls explain how that's supposed to work? And how it's different from a phone call or a handwritten letter?
To avoid miscommunication, e-mailers need to look at what they write from the recipient's perspective, Epley says
Epley doesn't sound too bright. You can't do this! You can try to guess; but they had it down hundreds of years ago - "it's as plain as the nose on your face." I can't see my nose. That's why newspapers employ (used to employ?) editors and proofreaders.
"A typical e-mail has this feature of seeming like face-to-face communication," Professor Epley says.
No it doesn't!
"It's informal and it's rapid, so you assume you're getting the same paralinguistic cues you get from spoken communication."
No I don't. Only an idiot would.
E-mail's ambiguity has special implications for minorities and women, because it tends to feed the preconceptions of a recipient. "You sign your e-mail with a name that people can use to make inferences about your ethnicity," says Epley. A misspelling in a black colleague's e-mail may be seen as ignorance, whereas a similar error by a white colleague might be excused as a typo.
That's the most racist and sexist paragraph I've read in a long time. Why would one assume a black (or a woman) is ignorant? Now, if he's writing in ebonics, then he IS ignorant, as ignorant as a cracker writing "ain't the winder purdy?"
E-mail tends to be short and to the point. This may arise from the time pressures we feel when writing them: We know e-mail arrives as soon as we send it, so we feel we should write it quickly, too.
H
i read your comment, and not 10 minutes later i heard someone a few cubes over doing just that..
/. and at least one other person was too..
i splattered coffee all over my monitor..
now i have to find a way to clean it up without having to expain that i was reading
hmm. maybe i should just wander around saying "I didn't spill the coffee."
Moo.
- Never ask more than 1 question in an e-mail. People will only answer either the first or the last question. If it's really necessary to ask multiple questions, make the mail look like a questionnaire (i.e. put all questions together, bulleted with numbers, with no text in between).
- If you ask a question, always put it at the very end of the mail, and don't forget the question mark.
- Never try to tell people more than 1 important thing in an e-mail.
- Never try to tell people an important thing and ask an important question in the same e-mail. They will most likely only read the important thing and forget about the question, even if you follow rule 2.
- Keep your e-mails so short that it's actually impossible to tell anything useful, but if you try to explain it properly it will be too long anyway to fit in the average person's attention span, and people will even understand less than from the too short mail.
Only if you really know your correspondent well, you can deviate from these rules.Email, like mail, is a mass noun. You send people email.
The word you're looking for "email messages". Or just "messages".
Dear Mr.Smith,
I certainly appreciate your gracious offer of friendship and, according to my philosophy, will immediately start treating you like one. In the name of our newly-forged friendship, I am wondering if you would be kind enough to advance me TEN THOUSAND US DOLLARS ($10,000.00) to rescue your troubled friend and his container. Surely, as a president of a bank, you ought to have no difficulty in procuring these funds and loaning them to me, your dearest friend, would you? In return you will have my ETERNAL gratitude and that tingly warm feeling that comes from receiving it. I'll then be VERY HAPPY to rescue your friend's container in return for only ONE MIEEELION US DOLLARS ($1,000,000.00).
In the name of our sincerest friendship,
Mr.Chemisor
A good friend in need.
You *do* realize that was a compliment, RIGHT? :)
Yep: Even though it was tough to go through the rough in Slough, I ploughed through with hardly a thought!
AT&ROFLMAO
The biggest problem is that e-mail addresses are too easy to type or click on. A substantial portion of the e-mail senders of the world just aren't literate enough to read and compose letters. With so many people online, it is easy to forget that most of them are functionally illiterate. They can write short strings of phrases with no capitalization or punctuation, but they can't really write to be understood or understand anything complicated.
I actually just read through Dickens' original manuscripts. His editor certainly helped him out a lot, for his writing really needed work:
:D but, like, it was ALSO like the WWOOOOOOORRRRRRRRSSSSSSSSSSST of times arrgh omgwtf!!!!!!11111OneoneJuanJuanJuan"
"OMFG it was soooooo like THE BEST of timez, guys!!
Heh, I used the same example above, but I remember it from an Saturday Night Live sketch with Edwin Newman.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Marshall McLuhan used to say that in electric communications (thinking of telegraph, radio, and television) the sender is sent. The effects of that type of communication was very much different than a book or a letter by post, both of which could also be sent, but sent as a proxy for the author.
With the acceleration due to the instantaneity of Internet-enabled communications, there is a reversal effect (as described in McLuhan's Laws of Media: The new science). With email, the receiver is received. That is, the person who receives the email imposes her/his own context, mood, and emotion to the received email, as if it was received in a face-to-face (i.e., oral-like) communication. It is the effect of the instant (as in f-t-f), but with the asynchonicity of proxy communication (as in book or post). Until one become acclimatized to the apparent incongruity, misinterpretation is bound to happen.
I remember experiencing the exact same effects when fax was new, and when email was new, both in a business context. When a customer became irate with what I thought was a civil fax, I was confused. When it happened again with the initial email some years later, I remembered the fax incident and thought there might be a pattern here. Now that I've spent the past few years studying, working, and consulting in media theory, I understand why it happens.
It's not the content; the medium is the message!
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog [stomp stomp] SIR!"
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Consider the classic following example. Read each sentence out loud, with emphasis on the bolded word.
And yet you, using only text, have been able to use the same five words in the same order in five different ways, delivering five different subtle meanings.
This points to the fact that the problem is not with writing vs. speaking, but (as I have said many times before to many people) with the way a message is written.
Too many people think that an email (or any written message) is simply "whatever I would say written down verbatim." This could not be farter from the truth. The syntax of written language is dramatically different than that of spoken language. One syntax should not be used in the other medium.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
That's not specific enough. It's possible for poorly written language to avoid ambiguity.
How about "Ambiguously written English is ambiguous?"
Tautologies FTW!
"Ambiguous English is poorly written!"
Stupid non-commutative operators...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
It also makes sense to use language that you have full command of.
Please refrain from using language of which you do not possess full command.
From my favorite Designing Women exchange:
Charlene: "Hi. Where y'all from?"
Woman: "We are from a place where they don't end a sentence with a preposition."
Charlene: "Oh, I'm terribly sorry. Where y'all from, bitch?"
Email is not emotional, only silly mortals are.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
That it why email, along with everyother conversation form known to man, are frequently misunderstood. I mean how many times have you said something and someone took offense because they thought you meant it some other way. ALL COMMUNICATION IS MIS UNDERSTOOD! Infact you are probably mis-understanding this very post!
A simile is like a metaphor.
I am not a crackpot.
there was a dumbass reading it.
iLife = you really have no life, but let's pretend
iPod = you think this is about you?? LOL!!!11 Look at our profits for the past 3 years.
Another example, please consider the following:
I helped my Uncle Jack off the horse.
I helped my uncle jack off the horse.
It's not just emphasis that can be the problem in the English language.
I call bullshit on this!
Writing an email, is almost exactly the same as writing an informal letter. You know, one that you put into envelope and drop into the mailbox. How many slashdot readers still corespond with friends or familly on paper? And no, postcards, and wish cards don't count!
It seems to be a dying art nowdays, but for hundreds of years people used snail mail to communicate with eachother. And for the most part, we figured out how to deal with the ambiguity of the language. You simply articulate your thoughts. Instead of writing one short ambigous sentence, you can allways write 3, that will clearly state your position, intent and indicate your tone. This is what they should teach you in an english class. Why did you think they make you write all these essays, and position papers in your english classes. Written communication is as important as verbal communication, if not more.
English language is not ambigous! We do not need verbal clues, and tone of voice to convey meaning. Think about it - somehow novel writers, poets, journalists and bloggers have no problems communicating their messages using written word. And yet, the second they start composing an email, all their english skills somehow dissapear and they revert to using emoticons, boldface and italics.
No, the #1 reason why emails are misinterpreted is that people who send and read them have poor written communication and reading comprehension skills to begin with.
I use email every day. It is actually my prefered mode of communication. And even though English is my second language, my messages are very rarely misinterpreeted. In the rare cases someone misunderstands me, I actually go to a great length to re-phease what I said and set the record straight in a follow-up email.
I'm teminally incoherent
This came from a "Christian Science Group" therefor invalidating whatever they have to say. They [Christians] pretty much told the world how they felt about science with the Inquisition, twice...
I've seen e-mail as a freebie for people who expound ad nauseum
:)
Much like slashdot posts. (I kid, I kid
I believe the real problem with email can be summed up in two statements.
People don't read carefully.
People don't write carefully.
Download my free songs!
The message on the screen says: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."
TECH SUPPORT: Sir, can you read me the exact wording of the error message on your screen?
END LUSER: Yeah, it says I did something illegal.
TECH SUPPORT: I need the exact words, sir.
END LUSER: I just told you! The program is illegal!
TECH SUPPORT: ...
It's the same thing with email. People with poor reading skills only see what they think the email says, not the actual words on the screen. Hell, I once had a lady flip out and insist to my boss that I told her to "leave me alone and figure it out yourself" because I sent her detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish what she needed to do.
Beauty is just a light switch away.
Consider the following sets of sentences:
The parent post correctly points out that often there is not enough context to provide cues to allow the recipient to decode all the information the sender intended to convey.
There are something like four main channels we use to communicate when speaking with another in person:
There are other more subtle channels, and some of these channels are the interplay of two channels (intent to be humorous, for example, can be indicated by offering conflicting information on different channels, or on the same channel at different times). The primary channel is Diction: verbal language is a model of rational thought. This is not the case for the media of the other channels; they are not models of rational thought, but are accompanying channels designed to offer logical content regarding the interpretation of the model.
Because the content of these channels is logical in nature, they can be rendered within the model -- that is, they can be rendered verbally. The information conveyed in these other channels is designed eliminate interpretational ambiguity. Thus, if one is skillful at this rendering, ambiguity can be largely eliminated in typewritten communication, at the minor cost of brevity. The less skill the sender posesses, the less the ambiguities are eliminated and the more major the cost to brevity. This is sometimes (but not always) the reason for the rambling nature of e-mails in any type of communication.
P.S. Note that in sentence two above, I did not offer supplimental verbal text to offer interpretation. That is because without context, it should be read in an even "tone," none of the words being emphasized. The other interpretations are the result of the assumption that the statement is in contrast to some other (often implicit) statement.
Politicians sometimes lie to get your vote, the Pope goes to church, and bicycles have two wheels. Seriously, is this article news to anyone?
Unless you are a scholar with some depth and breadth of experience, I suspect that your experience of civil war letters came from some history book or Ken Burns special. Those letters would be selected, specific examples of cream-of-the-crop writing, and may not reflect the writing of the masses.
Well then, everything is wrapped up in a neat little package! I really mean it, sorry if it wounded sarcastic.
"but I wonder how long it will be before emoticons are considered to be a proper part of natural languages in the same way that normal punctuation is?"
:-)
Your insight makes me smile
I've noticed that when I end a sentence in an emoticon it tends to replace the period, although that's not always a good way of doing it.
Chances are emoticons wil become part of the english alphabet in some dialects, however that will lead to more miscommunication as I learned to see something that was supposed to indicate confused bemusement, as something that represents befuddled annoyance.
Multiple artists' interpretations of ':-)' can lead to many subtle differences in meaning.
Oh You POS
I learned from a few hard lessons, if after a few exchanges a dialog became testy and began escalation, I'd intervene on behalf of myself and the correspondent by curtailing the e-mail until a quick chat on the phone could reset the tone. That almost always worked.
It's funny. Even though you bolded the word "always" I can't help but place emphasis on the word "almost." Maybe you could call me and we could talk this over?
-- dR.fuZZo
"That's why edmicman always writes in the third person" types edmicman, thoughtfully glancing out the window with a grin on his face. He is obviously happy as he writes this message. With a glint of joy in his eye, he continues: "It is much easier to describe tone and meaning if you describe things like you were writing a novel."
Woah, dude, good choice! It works really well. I've been trying it out! I won't kill the president today, I won't kill the president today, I won't kill the president today, I won't kill the president today. Try it out!
One sec, someone's at the door.
First mobster: Hey. They's throwin' robots.
Linguo: They are throwing robots.
Second mobster: It's disrespecting us. Shut up a'you face.
Linguo: Shut up your face.
Second mobster: Whatsa' matta you?
First mobster: You ain't so big.
Second mobster: Me an' him are gonna' whack you in the labonza.
Linguo: Mmmm... AAH!... bad grammar overload. Error. Error.
I think any communication changes its tone depending on the mood and importance of the conversation. E-mail also falls in this category. Though it is different than letters and IMs, we are only learning this medium's strengths and weaknesses. All communication can suffer misunderstanding, beause you can never actually predict what goes on in other person's mind. Even though many generations are used to talking, there is no guarantee that what you speak gets conveyed, so it is with e-mail. There are definitely invisible cues in e-mails like in body language and you have to train yourself to "Read" those. Sometimes e-mail works in your favor by not having to engage yourself physically in the conversation, especially for people who are better at writing than talking or social skills.
Also, I do agree that the tone can be set with "smiles/emotes." if I say, "Damn you suck" it has a completely different ring if I say, "Damn you suck! :P" IF some gets offended over the second example they have personal issues that need taken care of and I know a good doctor to help! ;)
I have also used all caps to emphasize certain words which can help a lot in setting a particular tone.
The big problem in text as well with words is that of sarcasm. It doesn't matter whether it's written or said someone will take offence if they don't know you. I'm sure you will find there really isn't that many differences between the two, it just depends on attitude.
I am generally very cautious to make sure the other person understands what I'm saying and generally don't use much sarcasm until I really know the person or feel they know me.
If I feel I don't understand what someone said to me, I will ask them flat out, "What do you mean?" This gives other people a chance to explain themselves, without being jumped on like a crazed baboon.
Plain and simple, people in general are idiots. There's the saying, "You can please some people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but not all the people all of the time." It doesn't matter what you type or say there will be misunderstandings with violence!
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. ~Albert Einstein
No dude. It is as simple as :"English is poorly written."
...has been, and always will be, more verbose than face to face or vocal communication. The reason is that body language and vocal intonations carry a form of communication in parallel with what is actually being said. When you are communicating via a written medium you must enumerate these subtle communications in your writing. This is why it is not easy to be an effective writer--you must learn to write differently than you speak in order to convey the same message.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Eactly!
People were communicating in writing for a long time before there was email. They succeeded in communicating regret, apprehension, friendship, love, and all human emotions without needing to use emoticons or to pick up the phone (a device which is also much younger than written communication). Pen pals have established the "rapport" which is supposedly impossible to reach by exchanging written correspondence.
If anything's true in the article, it's their point about the damage caused by hasty reading and writing.
I manage to sound reasonably intelligent without using big words all the time. My actual vocabulary is quite large, but my working vocabulary is much smaller -- I don't agonize over word choices. If I want to say "The room was dark," that's what I say. I don't say "The interior was black as obsidian." In fact, the former sentence makes more sense -- the latter could be talking about the color of the room, rather than the lighting.
I prefer to create an effect through content, rather than presentation.
It's just as easy to make a completely ambiguous statement with a 25k vocabulary as with a 10k vocabulary. It's just as possible to make an unambiguous statement with a 10k vocabulary as with a 25k vocabulary.
As far as resolution goes, think about anime. Most anime could be rendered easily as vector graphics, if the artists had bothered to do so. Most anime can be compressed quite a bit, and I know a lot gets lost in translation. And yet, most anime is better than most American TV shows. I'd certainly say Trigun is easily better than, say, Stargate SG-1, which requires much better resolution to look good. And while anime is beginning to use more and more digital effects, it's still a pretty simple medium.
For that matter, if you're just talking about resolution, Quake 2 looks far worse at 1600x1200 than Quake 4 does at 800x600. "But wait," you say, "that's simply because Quake 4 has far more polygons!" Well, yes. It has far more polygons and it uses them in different ways -- things like bump mapping, shaders, and particle effects that simply didn't exist for Quake 2. But the key here is, in this analogy, pixels are words, and polygons are ideas.
Content over presentation is true sophistication. Big words are fake sophistication, the kind that people hate "elitists" for. There is a time and a place to use the word "obsidian", but not when "black" or "dark" would do just as well.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
with less words.
with fewer words.
I honestly don't think it's that bad with email. I'd like to see their pie graphs comparing email with the phone to add a column for face to face communication. While it would be more accurate, I sincerely doubt it'd be close enough to 100% to claim that email is necessarily misunderstood.
Oh, and the written word has been around way longer than email.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's funny how everyone here thinks scientifically when it comes to everything _except_ language and culture, which of course are related to one another. Most everyone here believes in biological evolution, but what about the evolution of language? Languages and their words change whether you want them to or not. It's the most annoying thing to see people citing dictionaries to prove that their definition of a certain word is "correct". Dictionaries are not authorative sources: dictionaries only _describe_ usage and do not specify what the correct meaning(s) of a word should be. If a word gets "butchered" by the masses (hacker for example) then that's just too bad. Most of the words we use now meant something else in the past anyways. In written language, we have "standard" grammar and spelling to help intelligibility across regions and also to help ambiguity due to the lack of non-verbal cues. As for TFA, when we speak in person the actual words we can use can be ambiguous words and phrasing yet still be understood perfectly (most of the time) by the listener because they can unconciously pick up non-verbal cues that help them figure out what we meant. When people write informal emails (someone earlier said emails wasn't a word -- tough), however, they try to use the wording and phrasing that would normally work in real life but, without those non-verbal cues, the chances of being misunderstood go up greatly.
And, by the way, there's no such thing as a native speaker who speaks _better_ English than another native speaker of the same language, so attributing the "problem" to the language deficiencies of the new generation is just stupid - because they don't have one. You can say that people speak different "dialects" of English but you can't say person A speakers better than person B just because his dialect is more prestigious. Basically what I'm trying to say is people need to update the way they think about language and stop trying to prescribe usages/grammar and whatnot because that type of thought belongs in the middle ages. The same thing goes for pronunciation. If you think I'm talking out of my ass then do some research on your own.
Finally, someone has explained the limitations of email! It only took 35 years, but now I finally understand! I had no idea that when I was typing my message, the receiver wouldn't understand my tone of voice and couldn't see my face. Now that the Christian Science Monitor has explained it, it makes perfect sense.
If I ever have a child that I choose not to sacrifice to the Machine Gods, I'm gonna send them to the priethood. Those guys are sharp!
Shaw's Principle: Build a system even a fool could use, and only a fool would want to use it.
For an an example of a 'to the point' message (which predates email about a century), the Ems Despatch which helped unleash the Franco-Prussian War, is a good example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emser_Depesche
"First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well." ;-)
Those christians should be careful with such utterings. Does their Bible contain facial expression and tone of voice?
In a way, crosswords do harm by cluttering up the mind with an aimless heap of unusual words selected purely for mechanical exigencies and having no well-proportioned relation to the needs of graceful discourse.
- H. P. Lovecraft
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
I will agree that it is unlikely that an average office yob is going to have a level of linguistic prowess that allows him to convey every nuance of meaning through text. I do not ask that emails be Shakespearean sonnets full of flowery prose and deft, clever sentence construction. I can even overlook the occasional typo or grammatical or spelling error.
However, the problem is really that people are raging morons bordering on illiteracy.
Allow me to paste a few excerpts from real, actual emails I've received: For the record, all of these people are Americans and speak English natively.
Do you notice a theme here? What possible school of thought made someone think these were reasonable communiques? Some of them are bordering on incoherency; others are outright rude or demonstrate that the person didn't bother reading the email at all. Capitalization is a crapshoot and for some reason, people don't think periods are important. (I'm ignoring "direct to a modem via a switch, because that's not a problem with English, but seriously, what the fuck?)
No, the problem isn't email. The problem is stupidity. Email, as are all other text communications, is a perfectly valid way of sending someone a clear message, but the desire to do so has to be there, as does a basic understanding of the language.
The notion that "email is hard to understand" is idiotic. People can't bloody read or write -- that's the problem. These are supposed to be adults, and professionals, and most if not all of them graduated college. Yet in their minds, this drivel is what constitutes a serious attempt at communication to another professional.
I doubt any one of you is having a great deal of difficulty understanding what I'm saying here. I've explained my observations rationally. You can tell I'm annoyed or angry or frustrated. And this is the same medium as email uses -- plain text.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article.
However, I have considered for some time now that e-mails are like a return to the days of old where people over distances communicated primarily by written letters. The significant technical difference is that letters took much longer to deliver, and of course there was a postage fee. Thus people would take great time and care composing a letter. These days, e-mails are so commonplace that people take precious little care composing and reading them.
I also feel that people today are much less capable of expressing themselves clearly and eloquently. One can write an unambiguous letter if one avoids writing like they speak (e.g. colloquialisms, slang). Writing should not be the same as speaking by in large, for all the reasons that I'm sure the article addresses. Inflection is hard to achieve, so the words literally need to speak for themselves on their own merits.
When I read letters written by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, it is hard to believe that there is anything inherently wrong or limiting with the written word. In fact, it is quite the opposite. The beauty of the written word is that it empowers the composer to scrutinize his work to ensure the message is clear and concise; it gives him the chance to retract a statement that might have been inflammatory, or add a statement that wins the argument.
If anything, e-mails should enable greater understanding. The medium is too often misused.
Poor, misunderstood emails. All they ever wanted was to be loved. :(
They want their email etiquette rules back.
Seriously, are there even 10 people left in the civilized world that don't understand this?
One of my old project managers had a risk management philosophy that basically said that the form of communications you should you use is dependent on the risk associated miscommunication.
So if we have a problem worth a couple of hundred dollars we sent an e-mail. If it was worth a couple of thousand dollars we made a phone call. If it was worth tens of thousands of dollars we got in the car and saw the people face to face. (This was the construction industry so a few thousand dollars is still a small problem)
The whole point of this was risk mitigation. Most people simply do not factor in the risk that miscommunication can add to a project.
Actually, natural languages that contain words that signify emotion (modal particles) already exist. An example is Chinese, which has words like (ne), which can express frustration when used with certain other words.
That's really the only substantial advantage of using the telephone. It's actually a lousy way to convey detailed information. Email misinterpretation is usually because either the sender can't be bothered to write clearly or the reciver can't be bothered read for comprehension.
Telephone allows the receiver to ask clarifying questions and the receiver to test for comprehension. More often than not, though, it's a trap.
The receiver forgets what was said and has no record.
The receiver says he understands and does not.
The sender forgets to test for comprehension of all parts of the message or even to convey all parts of the message.
It irritates the hell out of me, when after taking great pains to write a clear and consice email, I get a "call me". The result is 30 minutes of time-wasting where half the message isn't sent and what is sent is remembered incorrectly or forgotten.
This is somewhat different from in-person conversations. There the sender can be sure that he has the receiver's attention and can use various visual aids like white boards.
Inflection or not, people will interprit a message based more on their emotional state than the content of the message. No matter how you emphasise "I didn't steal the money" the recipient will respond based on their emotional/mental state. Depending on who reads it, you just as likely to get any one of the following responses: Well who did steal the money? I didn't steal the money, why are you accusing me? Don't call me a thief. Yes you did. What did you steal? What money? I didn't think you did. I like tacos. This is because most people have poor listening skills and even poorer reading skills.
Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness.
As compared to a phone call or instant messaging, composing an email allows me to collect and organize my thoughts *far* better. A lot of the time while composing a note, I will change it substantially, improving upon the original idea. Writing stuff down is a *great* way to develop your idea and present it better (if you have a baseline of writing skills).
And I don't know how many times, that upon reflection, I decided not to hit that send button, avoiding a lot of grief. (Is it really worth starting a conflict over this issue? Nah, DELETE.) If I had picked up the phone, I would have been committed before walking through all my thoughts on a given issue.
(Of course, that last skill is developed through many experiences of "why, oh, why, oh, why did I hit that send button. Wah!")
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Ok, I don't understand this. Can someone fill me in? How could the bolded sentence be misunderstood?
they want their etiquette lesson back
Emails? Fishes? What's the difference?
And "e-mail" should be hyphenated, you silly Americans.
- IP
This is why I think people "invented" emoticons :)
Or, more specifically, why Scott Fahlman first made an ASCII smiley on 19 September 1982, when people didn't realise the joke he'd made about a lift being out of commission after someone contaminated it with mercury in a scientific experiment gone awry actually was a joke.
Hey, I'm about as arrogant and elitist as it gets when it comes to language and usage, but I disagree that smilies are useless.
;), and a lot of smilies are pretty fucked up and overused, but you have to admit that they're essentially a new sort of punctuation mark.
Mind you, I get by on just
You wouldn't ask a question without a question mark, or shout at someone without an exclamation mark, would you?
Either:
It is impossible to add too much coolant to the chamber or
You should never add too much coolant to the chamber
They mostly compare e-mail to phones, and conclude among other things that:
- e-mail lack body language and facial expressions.
- e-mail makes you answer immidiately, instead of taking enough time to think about it.
I don't know what kind of phone the author of the article has, but mine certainly doesn't transfer body language and facial expressions. And when was the last time you waited half an hour to answer a question, while the other person was just holding his phone, waiting for the answer? Compared to taking half an hour to answer an e-mail?
I don't know about everyone else, but I don't have a feeling that I need to answer e-mails fast. Often they have been sitting in my inbox for half an hour before I even read them, so what kind of difference is a few minutes going to make? On the other hand, the reasons given above for what's the problem with e-mail pretty much describes why I hate phone calls. I feel I need to answer immidiately, I can't just let them wait, while re-reading what they just said. And I can't think while they are waiting, that makes me feel stressed, and when stressed my brain shuts down. It's not unusual for me to find out what I *should* have said a couple of minutes after putting down the phone.
On the other hand, I can read an e-mail several times, to see if I missed something, and I can use all the time I need to write an answer.
Of course it might help that I'm a technical person (software developer) mostly writing mails to other technical persons, so the mails are usually kept precise and unambigous. (Ambigous code doesn't compile, so programmers are used to avoiding being
ambigous).
If they had been stupid enough to write it in an email, I would be tempted to get the police involved just to teach them a lesson.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Theres also the problem that smilies aren't always understood unless theyre replaced by an image like in im programs
:-) but a wink ;-) could be I'm flirting or I'm joking :-| could mean sarchasm or neutral feelings. then you go into the ones that have been made up for im only that actualy are pretty meaningless without images x-( I'm sick?
:)
also like you said the meaning also changes based on context too
a smiles always a way of saying I'm happy
the only true way to get meaning across is fully in person so all expressions can be seen and heard, and even then people get misunderstood.
wouldnt it be funny if in a future everyone only commicated with email and im, so when they're actually in person they say the emoticons
for example laughing at a joke
El oh el, colon dash capital dee
lets hope we never get to that stage
I love the smell of burning karma in the morning...
Although tbh, I'm not sure it ever was.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Question: Why compare two ways of communicating and have one of them as a norm? I wouldn't expect you to "understand what I am saying" as much if I expressed it in dance, rather to spoken language.
Sounds rather suspicious no matter how you interpret it.
Of course if they come straight out and ask you, you can answer unambiguously with ease:
Question: Why compare two ways of communicating, and use on of them as a norm when judging their ability to communicate something? I wouldn't expect you to "understand what I am saying" if I express myself in dancing, rather to spoken language.
Am the only one who read this and thought "Well, no shit, Sherlock."
Yes!!!! Using a lot of exclamations points works great!! It really gets the point across! ;-)
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
You don't actually manage anyone, do you?
Personally, if MY subordinates came to me because some old guy was yelling over a couple bucks missing from petty cash, I would laugh right along with them. Priorities, my friend.
I guess it matters what kind of job you have. Assuming you do manage, you sound like a manager at a local Staples or TGI Fridays or something. In my line of work, there's no sense getting one's panties in a knot over a couple of bucks when we're dealing with equipment and ROIs in the hundreds of thousands.
"In any case, this smiley after that sentence would inevitably give me a very negative impression about you."
That's under the assumption that you've never met me. You wouldn't know my sense of humor. I was assuming we'd be coworkers.
Not to mention, I'm talking about a very specific case, here. We're not talking the embesselment of hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're talking a few bucks out of petty cash. The wink and tongue sticking out, to me, means "Look, this is nothing to get our panties in a knot over."
"thou shant shift 2"
I've noticed that when I end a sentence in an emoticon it tends to replace the period, although that's not always a good way of doing it.
... :)
To get around this, I usually use an elipsis
In any case, this smiley after that sentence would inevitably give me a very negative impression about you.
...
...
Actually, what's missing from your interpretation, and indeed from this whole discussion, is context! Interpretting the tone of a sentence in someone's writing relies just as much on what preceeds it, as it does on any emoticon or emphasis
Until we know what that line about stealing money relates to, we don't know if the original poster was justifying the fact that he ripped off his workplace, defending himself in a don't-shoot-the-messenger attitude, or teasing his housemate who nabbed some cash from the kitty
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Does that translate to, "I'll have to write everything in Welsh"?
wouldnt it be funny if in a future everyone only commicated with email and im, so when they're actually in person they say the emoticons
I actually know a lot of people who use lol, rofl, *wink* etc. like they are real words. It's quite sad, really.
The punctuation is fine.
"Go help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
This assumes that "your uncle" is unambiguous, for example if he is with you and your friends. The use of commas here would be for the purpose of restatement. In this case "your uncle" and "Jack" are restatements of the same noun. This is perfectly acceptable grammar.
In addition, the following is correct as well.
"Go help your uncle Jack off the horse."
Here, rather than a restatement, we have greater specificity. If we know (or can assume) that this person has more than one uncle, we should specify that "uncle Jack" is the uncle of focus. On the other hand, now that I think of it, both words could be capitalized as "Uncle Jack" could be considered a complete proper noun in the latter case.
Other possibilities include the following:
"Go! Help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
"Go, help your uncle, Jack, off the horse."
"Go help your uncle Jack. Off the horse."
"Go help your uncle. Jack off the horse."
"Go help your uncle. Jack, off the horse!"
And on and on. It is a shame that many rely on italics, bold, all capital letters, and emoticons to convey thoughts when a comma or an exclamation point (just one!) would suffice.
It is perhaps an equal shame when others attempt to correct punctuation mistakes that aren't there.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
"This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put."
At the risk of appearing pedantic with regard to quotations.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
its not email's fault that people using it don't proofread! i often write emails, save the drafts, and return to the email later in the day or even days later, to get a fresh perspective and eradicate superfluous comments and clarify meanings.
Trouble is -- well written English can also be ambiguous.
I don't think Homer, Li Po, Chaucer, Goethe or Whitman used smileys.
Shall I compare the to a Summer's dayI don't think so...
The other week I was pointed to a fascinating article about nonverbal communication,
m
written for the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell:
http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.ht
It is about "face reading": reading a person's emotional state by looking at their face.
It turns out that researchers have found over 40 specific, culture independent signs
people make with their face to convey an emotional state. The signs are involuntary:
people are trained at suppressing them, but the suppression only kicks in after
fractions of a second.
So face movements form a universal "language" that everybody writes,
and the researchers can give you a crash course if you need one.
Clearly a universal and well-established form of human communication.
Many of our tiny little muscles in the face appear to have no other use than
for this communication.
I don't doubt that the same could be done, or has been done, for the rest of the body.
In e-mail, all that remains of out facial movement language is the smiley!
But conveying emotions is extremely important in communication: intentions
depend on emotions, and communication is often about getting each other to
act in a specific way. Words exist to describe emotions, of course, and situations
that bring about certain emotions in the writer can be described in the hope
that they will bring about the same emotions in the reader. But this takes a great
deal of slowly acquired skill with words, and it will always be much slower and
more indirect than use of the facial movement language we are born with.
No, I haven't seen research to prove this, but it seems obvious enough to me.
English is ambiguous because it is a mish mash of every other languages.
My personal peeve about English as a language is the lack of an official plural for "you". My personal preference is for the Australian "youse", but would accept the american southern contraction "y'all".
I prefer "y'all", and I defy anybody to criticize my grammar when I use it. : )
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!