January 27, 2006
Your email is not read how you write it
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I’ve
mentioned before the importance of reading your email out loud before you send it (the link is on my old blog which seems to have gone down as I type this).
Reading your email out loud serves several ends:
- It enables you to have a final ‘check and balance’ pause
- It enables you to ‘hear’ any words that may cause the mental tongue to trip, thus causing a barrier to effective reception
- It gives you a chance to ensure that your sentence length, and sentences, flow naturally and conversationally
- It gives you a chance to double check that your audience will understand the communication (their reading and comprehension level may be lower than yours, for example)
Now further research from Justin Kruger and his team published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (I know, I know… you all get a copy but I thought I’d get in first) backs up my views.
Says Kruger:
Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can… Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.
Stumble it!
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