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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......
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.
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)
Fortunately, nobody ever misunderstands spoken conversations.
Find coupons in Greeley
... 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.
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
...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
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.
Just like you did, e.g. make the words that need emphasis bold , etc..
"Houston, we have a problem."
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?)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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"
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
How about "Poorly written English is ambiguous."
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
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.
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.
I just happen to be very fashion-concious, but for some reason ....
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.
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".
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.
Right. Before you treat us to any more of your insights on the history of religion and science, you might want to brush up on the history and reputation of the Christian Science Monitor.
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! --
I helped my uncle Jack off the horse
v/s
I helped my uncle jack off the horse
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 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.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.
Yep: Even though it was tough to go through the rough in Slough, I ploughed through with hardly a thought!
AT&ROFLMAO
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!
there was a dumbass reading it.
I must agree with Winston Churchill: that is a practice up with which I will not put.
I am not a crackpot.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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!