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.'"

inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missing

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 didn't steal the money.
• I didn't steal the money.
• I didn't steal the money.
• I didn't steal the money.
• I didn't steal the money.

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.)

Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin

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.

Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin

Yep: Even though it was tough to go through the rough in Slough, I ploughed through with hardly a thought!

Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin

How about "Poorly written English is ambiguous."

Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin

That's not specific enough. It's possible for poorly written language to avoid ambiguity.

How about "Ambiguously written English is ambiguous?"

Tautologies FTW!

Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin

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 [lojban.org] 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.

Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin

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.

That's why God made CAPITAL letters

When one want's to convey importance in an email, merely capitalize every letter in the important word: I didn't STEAL the money. Of course, the problem with this approach becomes readily apparent: How do you emphasize the 'I'? Simple, remove all capitalization from any other word (and for good measure, get rid of that pesky punctuation, except those cute little ellipses). So, as an example:

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.

Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin

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".

Re:inflection, emphasis, tone, etc. usually missin

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.

Importance of Capitalization

I helped my uncle Jack off the horse
v/s
I helped my uncle jack off the horse

My opinion on this article...

:p

Another reason...

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...

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...

Ignorance and Illiteracy

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.

This why I hate smilies..

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.

Fu the rescue!

That's why I usually begin my letters with:
FU U F'ing F'er.

Such a versitile word. And no confusion!

Emoticons

This is why I think people "invented" emoticons :)

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 :D

Ah well, back to my nintendo (>',')>

Re:Emoticons

Hahaha, that was funny. Or did you not mean it in a sarcastic way? Without the emoticon it was very hard to tell.

all you need to do..

... 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)

Re:all you need to do..

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.

Same as a snail mail letter

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.

Rapport

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).

Um...

...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.

But it can work for good as well...

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.

I read it on Slashdot moments ago

"People Suck at Spotting Phishing" that is "Why Emails Are Misunderstood".

another favorite example... unintended semantics

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:

A long-time foreman of a Nuclear Power Plant was at his retirement party. When asked if he had any parting words of wisdom regarding nuclear power, the foreman winked and said, "Remember, you can never add too much coolant to the core reaction chamber." The story ends with the foreman looking up from his chair on the beach across the bay to see his old plant going up in a mushroom cloud.

Even more shocking, from TFA

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!

Re:Even more shocking, from TFA

You've never worked in tech support have you?

I have been waiting.

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.

Same thing goes for posts

Maybe email clients should have a 'Preview' button too, eh?

I'm guilty of this...

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.

But sometimes emails are supposed to offend

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.

Fighting via email

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.

Work rules

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.

Why misunderstanding is misunderstood

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.

Poor Vocabulary?

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.

Nothing Wrong with E-mail

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.*

1. Lacks facial expressions? Emoticons really do work... especially in block communication like e-mail. It doesn't take long for someone to get used to emoticons as a "second language" of sorts to real-life facial expressions.
2. Rushed communication? I disagree completely. E-mail, to me, allows me to take my time carefully crafting a message, allowing me to make sure it's worded right and get rid of ambiguities, prejudices, assumptions and errors. In contrast, talking in person often leads to useless circular banter and social faux-pas due to its instantaneous and rushed nature.
3. Personal rapport? I tend to find e-mail (and other online/text-based) relationships a lot more robust than personal ones, because emotional responses are buffered by the text -- it's a lot harder to get mad at a page of text than a person, generally. Also, in combination with #1, this helps keep things professional and to the point.

* 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!

The 5 rules of e-mail

After years of internet usage, I have distilled 5 rules for an e-mail to be understandable for the average person.

1. 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).
2. If you ask a question, always put it at the very end of the mail, and don't forget the question mark.
3. Never try to tell people more than 1 important thing in an e-mail.
4. 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.
5. 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.

I always thought it was because...

there was a dumbass reading it.

Re:ummm

Fortunately, nobody ever misunderstands spoken conversations.

Re:Hmmm...

Right. Before you treat us to any more of your insights on the history of religion and science, you might want to brush up [wikipedia.org] on the history and reputation of the Christian Science Monitor.