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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.
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.
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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.
"People Suck at Spotting Phishing" that is "Why Emails Are Misunderstood".
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:
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?
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.
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.
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"
How about "Poorly written English is ambiguous."
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
You've never worked in tech support have you?
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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".
what's with the long face?
Hi. I am the founder of the "Adenoid Hypertrophy" Foundation. I must inform you that adenoid hypertrophy, if left uncorrected during childhood and early adolescence will result in an increase longitudinal and decreased lateral length of the face of the sufferer. This is called Adenoid fascies by doctors, and looks like a "long face". As a representative of the thousands of people who suffer from this disfiguring disease, I must say that we are offended by your reference to "long faces" as if this were some sort of joke. We consider ourselves damaged by your remarks and insist that you retract your statement immediately or face the consequences which may include litigation.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I helped my uncle Jack off the horse
v/s
I helped my uncle jack off the horse
- 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.Yep: Even though it was tough to go through the rough in Slough, I ploughed through with hardly a thought!
AT&ROFLMAO
That's not specific enough. It's possible for poorly written language to avoid ambiguity.
How about "Ambiguously written English is ambiguous?"
Tautologies FTW!
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.
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.