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Tone is not the only item you can find "in between the lines" in
an email. The article below references some of these things. These are all
noteworthy since so many people that you communicate with are ones you you have
never met or are likely to meet. Just as with tone, a single nuance can destroy
the entire content of of an email.
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Work Smart
What Your Email Style Reveals About Your
Personality
You think about how you're perceived in
every other social setting--why not email? Get your point across while staying
true to yourself before hitting send.
By Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic From
fastcompany.com
Most of your work communications are
probably over email. You likely email your colleagues and clients more
frequently than you speak to them on the phone or meet with them in person.
Unlike face-to-face communication, it can
be more difficult to effectively convey important aspects of your personality,
attitudes, and style in email.
Is there a connection between our email
persona and our real-life persona? How competently can the average person infer
our personality from our emails? The answer comes in four points:
People use language in different ways, and
those differences are a function of their personality. Our choices are
spontaneous and unconscious but they do reflect who we are. Text mining studies
have found associations between key words and major aspects of personality. The
more frequently people use those words, the more likely it is that they display
certain personality traits.
For example, extraverts talk about
fun-related stuff: bars, Miami, music, party, and drinks. People with lower EQ
are more likely to use emotional and negative words: stress, depressed, angry,
and unfortunate. Narcissists talk about themselves--the number of
self-referential words (e.g., “I,” “me,” “mine,” “myself,” etc.) is indicative
of someone’s self-love and entitlement. Artistic and intellectual individuals
use highbrow words, such as narrative, rhetoric, and leitmotiv.
There is also huge variability in people’s
communicational style, even when the words may not differ that much. For
instance, absence of typos is a sign of conscientiousness, perfectionism, and
obsessionality. Poor grammar reflects lower levels of IQ and academic
intelligence. Emoticons are a sign of friendliness (if the email is informal)
or immaturity (in work-related emails).
Long emails reflect energy and
thoroughness, but also some degree of neediness and disorganization. Chaotic
emails are a sign of creativity or psychopathic tendencies. Instant responses
reflect impulsivity and low self-control. Late responses are a sign of
disinterest, and no responses signal passive-aggressive disdain.
Even when emails do reflect our
personality, human observers may fail to interpret the cues. This tends to
occur for two main reasons: they are either not paying sufficient attention
(focusing instead on what they want to say), or over-interpreting things.
Importantly, correct interpretations
require paying attention to contextual factors, such as awareness of the
sender’s main motivation, and distilling the signal from the noise. It is also
important to determine whether cues are truly related to senders’ personality
or transient mood and behaviors.
The bottom line is that even the most
intuitive observer of email behaviors may fail to perform as well as a
computer-generated algorithm, especially if they have never had physical
interactions with the sender or lack any background information on them. Of
course, this does not stop people from making inferences. Human beings are
prewired to make instant and unconscious evaluations of people, and we tend to
disregard information that is not congruent with our initial prejudices--this
is why stereotypes are so pervasive, and that goes for the email world, too.
Trust needs chemistry, which happens in
person
Online trust is the backbone of a huge
economy: we wouldn’t have eBay, Uber, Tinder, or Airbnb unless we were open to
the idea of trusting strangers simply based on their digital footprint or
crowdsourced reputation. Yet going beyond superficial relations with others
still requires face-to-face interactions--and it probably always will. This is
why our impressions of others are rarely the same in the digital as in the
physical world: even phone conversations omit key information about
individuals’ personalities.
Ultimately, chemistry cannot be translated
into data. And unlike computers, humans are more trusting when they can make
decisions on the basis of their intuition, rather than pure data. Perhaps this
is the main explanation for the fact that face-to-face meetings are far from
extinction. Video technology is popular, but only because it has replaced phone
conversations, rather than physical meetings.
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In addition to this blog, I have authored the
premiere book on Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to
Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile,
reviews of the book and content excerpts at:
If you would like to listen to experts in all
aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an
online newsletter via
paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and
Yahoo.
I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group
and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman
Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been
contributing to the blogs Everything
Email and emailmonday . My work
has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as
The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider
University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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