www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
====================================================
From
thenation.com
Wednesday,
Apr 26, 2017 11:00 AM EDT
Not just grammar Nazis: Why mistakes
in short emails could make anyone judge you
Why are we so sensitive to email errors?
Julie Boland and Robin Queen, The
Conversation
This
article was originally published on The
Conversation.
I’m
a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental
that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator,
Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social
groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all. 
We
were curious: what makes our reactions so different?
We
didn’t think the difference was due to our professional specialties. So we did
some research to find out what makes some people more sensitive to writing
mistakes than others.
What
prior research tells us
Writing
errors often appear in text messages, emails, web posts and other types of
informal electronic communication. In fact, these errors have interested other
scholars as well.
Several
years before our study, Jane Vignovic and Lori Foster Thompson,
who are psychologists at North Carolina State University, conducted an
experiment about vetting a potential
new colleague, based only on an email message.
College
students who read the email messages perceived the writer to be less
conscientious, intelligent and trustworthy when the message contained many
grammatical errors, compared to the same message without any errors.
And
at our own University of Michigan, Randall J. Hucks, a doctoral student in
business administration, was studying how spelling errors in online
peer-to-peer loan requests at LendingTree.com affected the likelihood of
funding. He found that spelling errors led to worse
outcomes on multiple dimensions.
In
both of these studies, readers judged strangers harshly simply because of
writing errors.
Typos
vs. grammos
Over
the last several years, we conducted a series of experiments to investigate how
written errors change a reader’s interpretation of the message, including the
inferences that the reader makes about the writer.
For
our original experiments, we
recruited college students to be our readers, and for our most recent experiment, we
recruited people from across the country who differed widely in terms of age
and level of education.
In
all of our experiments, we asked our participants for information about
themselves (e.g., age, gender), literacy behaviors (e.g., time spent pleasure
reading, texts per day), and attitudes (e.g., How important is good grammar?).
In the most recent experiment, we also gave participants a personality test.
In
each experiment, we told our participants to pretend that they had posted an ad
for a housemate and gotten 12 email responses. After reading each email, the
participants rated the writer as a potential housemate, and on other factors
like intelligence, friendliness, laziness, etc.
In
fact, we had created three versions of each email. One version had no mistakes.
One version included a few typos, e.g. abuot for about. Another
version had errors involving words that people often mix up, such as there
for their (we called these grammos).
Everyone
read four normal messages, four with “typos,” and four with “grammos.”
Different people read the other versions of each message, so that we could
separate responses to the errors from responses to the message content.
Errors
matter — but to whom?
In
all of our experiments, readers rated the writers as less desirable if the
emails included either typos or grammos. We expected this based on the earlier
research, described above. In addition, people differed in their sensitivity to
the two types of errors.
For
example, college students who reported higher use of electronic media were less
sensitive to the errors, though time spent pleasure reading had no effect.
Prior research on writing errors had not compared types of errors, nor
collected information about the readers, in order to see which reader
characteristics influenced interpretation.
Both
of these strategies for understanding how errors impact interpretation are
unique to our research.
Perhaps
the most interesting finding is from the experiment in which we gave participants
the personality test. It measured the five traits considered to be important in
personality research: extraversion (i.e. how outgoing or social a person is),
agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness and neuroticism (prone
to anxiety, fear, moodiness).
This
experiment involved adults who varied a lot in age and education, but those
differences didn’t affect their interpretation of the writing errors.
Unlike
the initial study with college students, use of electronic media had no effect.
What mattered were the personality traits: people responded to the writing
errors based on their personality type.
People
who scored high in conscientiousness or low on the “open-to-experience” trait
were more bothered by the typos. People who scored low on agreeability were
more bothered by the grammos. And people who scored low on “extraversion” were
more bothered by both types of errors. In contrast, how people scored on
neuroticism did not alter the impact of either type of error.
Remember,
by being bothered we mean that the reader gave lower ratings on the housemate
questionnaire to writers who made that type of error.
Why
a short email could matter
Our
findings — that our personality influences our interpretation of a message
— complement other research that has found that our personality influences
what we say and how we say it.
In
2015, Gregory Park and other
researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge analyzed
Facebook posts from more than 66,000 users who had also completed a
personality test based on the same five personality traits that we measured in
our study. They found the use of words like love, party and amazing
are correlated with extraversion, while the words sick, hate and anymore
are correlated with neuroticism.
This
research built upon
earlier work
by researchers Tal Yarkoni and James W.
Pennebaker.
While
reading our research, two key points need to be kept in mind. First, we think
that errors influenced readers’ perception of the writer mainly because the
writer was otherwise unknown — the short email was the only basis for
judgment. Second, we didn’t ask the readers how likely they were to point out
errors to the people who make them.
So,
it doesn’t necessarily follow from our study that your friends will view you
more negatively if you don’t proofread your email messages, or that you can
predict which people will call you on it based on their personality.
But,
you might want to keep these findings in mind when you write for an unknown
audience or when you read something from someone you don’t know.
Julie Boland,
Professor of Psychology and Linguistics, University of
Michigan and Robin Queen,
Professor of Linguistics, English Language and Literatures and Germanic
Languages and Literatures. , University of
Michigan
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