|
|
|
|
The Art of E-mail
|
I have come to the conclusion that crafting e-mail is an art. If you want to successfully communicate to a group of people, you need to have a healthy talent for articulate speech. Sure, you could argue that any form of communication, written or verbal requires the same skills, and you'd be mostly right.
Readers almost always read business e-mails defensively, disecting words and inferring intentions that don't actually exist. Even if the author of a message expressed no negative emotions or intent in his composition, readers will often infer a negative reaction, especially when there are multiple recipients. I get very frustrated when people assume I am "yelling" at them when I am just stating a fact. Consider the following sentence:
"I fail to understand the benefits of the proposal we discussed in today's meeting. I did not see any evidence that the proposed solution would work at all. Did I miss something?"
In many cases, if you were the person who drafted the proposal, you might infer that I thought your proposal was ineffective or "not good enough". You might also think that I wasn't paying attention in the meeting or perhaps I am trying to highlight the failure of the presenter. The literal interpretation of the message is almost always coupled with a negative emotion stemmed from a defense posture of the reader.
I do acknowledge that some of the posturing comes from the political nature of a business environment. Still, the communication itself can complete change emotional reading by adding to it. Now read the e-mail.
"I fail to understand the benefits of the proposal we discussed in today's meeting. I did not see any evidence that the proposed solution would work at all. Did I miss something? :)"
Online communication has a fairly short history, but it has unique cultural implications that aren't prevalent in other forms of communication (that I can tell). For example, to solve the often mis-interpreted emotions behind my communication above, I used an emoticon to steer the emotional intentions of the message to a more nuetral or positive plane. The smiley face ":)" or wink ";)" are typically used to ensure that the reader isn't taking the message too negatively. While many forms of online communication (forums, instant messaging, cell phone text messaging, etc) use emoticons, e-mail typically the only form of communication where emoticons are used in the normal course of business.
In short, this drives me nuts. Because I tend to be a straight-shooter, I am often misread and people assume I am upset at them. Lately I find myself overusing smiley faces and winks to prevent the problem. I suppose it's possible to express a neutral or positive tone without emoticons, but that usually requires adding irrelevant information to the e-mail which reduces the brevity.
"I fail to understand the benefits of the proposal we discussed in today's meeting. I did not see any evidence that the proposed solution would work at all. Did I miss something? Sometimes my bone-headed nature fails to grasp the obvious! Please help!"
Now I've had to call out a potential fault in myself, which takes any pretext of assumed failure out of the message. For the most part, this helps to set the readers at ease and puts them into a more helpful mode of thinking. However, it added easily 20-30% to the size of the message that has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Now I am no fuddy-duddy by any means. I don't have any sticks in places where the sun don't shine. I don't mind the subtle and intricate nature of human speech and the english language. But, darn it all, I type a gabillion messages a day and it eats a lot of my time to compose my messages in ways that won't be misinterpreted. If my original sentence were in a book or a newspaper I don't it would have the same emotional response that e-mail generates. For some reason, e-mail is more personal and affecting.
Additionally, I find brevity to be critical for business communication. If you want someone to read it, it had better be short! 80% of e-mails that are as long as this blog entry won't be read in their entirety. They will be skimmed, often looking for their name or key words that might affect them.
Because I work in IT, I often need to communicate complicated messages to people that just don't want to read lengthy messages. I could use smileys instead of fluffy speech, but then my e-mail doesn't look serious. How serious can my message be when it's littered with :) and ;) and :( ?
I long for a world where people can just relax and stop reading more out of a message than is literally there. For the record, this message does not count concise or necessarily the most effective ordering of english words and sentences. I refuse to spend as much time on my blog as I do on my work e-mails. ;)
|
|
