#510 No thanks to you

There was a story on the news the other day about a guy who has written a book on email misunderstandings. The book is called “Send.” It is a more detailed discussion of what my colleagues and I have been kibitzing about around the coffee cooler as of late. Namely, that people fail to realize how badly they communicate in writing. Putting aside for a moment the barbaric custom of only using lowercase, and the even more annoying disregard for spelling, and the even most annoying habit of failing to punctuate—except of course with wiggling emoticons—the problem is that people think they are conveying emotion when they are not. Or vice versa, they are not conveying emotion when they should. The author used an example of a woman who had conducted a training session with her employees. She then sent out a mass email asking them if there was anything the employees felt the boss left out of the discussion. One of her replies was from a worker who wrote “nothing no thanks to you.”
What the employee meant was “Nothing-comma-No-comma- thanks to you…and your great teaching.” The extra words and punctuation could have made all the difference. When I do one of these essays, I can keep words to a minimum because I know I’m going to be inflecting things in such a way that you’ll catch my drift. If I were to write each and every one of these out with every delicate snarky nuance they’d be a third longer. Conveying emotion takes more words. Sparse writing allows for more interpretation by the mind and mood of the reader. If the reader is in a bad mood, even the fairly direct “we are out of paper” may seem like a snide remark on the reader’s inability to keep office supplies up to date, or a nagging reminder, or a whining commentary on the sender’s lack of ability to act independently. Try this. Imagine sending a bunch of people an email that just says, “America, ya gotta love it.” See how many ways you can make that sound in your head. That’s how many ways they’ll take it.
America, ya gotta love it