We can often use facial cues, body language, and subtle changes in someone's intonations to make accurate assessments of his/her underlying emotional state. This is basic to our experience of the world as social animals, and it allows to gain the trust, loyalty, and even love of those with whom we communicate. A message with emotion contains information about its creator, thus providing a window into the inner workings of a mind otherwise hidden behind the opacity of purely factual exchange. In the modern world, the most important exchanges often take written form, and increasingly over email. We can be faced with the challenge of either hiding our emotional reaction or revealing it subtly in an email. And sometimes, we may accidentally reveal the way we really feel, or mislead the recipient of our messages by using certain emotional words or constructs which we do not intend. Below are three common mistakes people make when writing emails which should be purely factual but unintentionally smell of the writer's secret feelings, slipping out from underside of the message like escaped flatulence: (1) Omitting the salutation. It is usually clear that after some time has passed since the last exchange, a salutation is in order when sending a new email. In fact, it is expected that if more than an hour has passed since the last exchange, the email should begin with a simple greeting. Leaving this out endows an email with an arrogant tone, or worse, annoyed and disrespectful. (2) Omitting a valediction. If you are asking for anything at all, your email should end with a very respectful and grateful valediction: at the bare minimum, a "Thanks". This much is obvious to most of us. But what about when the email is not asking for anything at all? What about when the email itself is simply delivering requested information? Many people feel that in those cases, it is fine to end with just a name, or perhaps a sterile combination of initials, dashes, and/or official titles, or most egregiously nothing at all. However, this leads the recipient to infer a negative emotional valence to the message and weaken whatever connection exists between him/her and the writer. In these cases, it is best to sign off with "Best," "Cheers," "Warmly," or in a more informal setting, with an emoticon. It is strongly discouraged to use the same signature for every email context. Take the extra 10 seconds it takes to find the appropriate valediction, and increase your social karma. (3) Too many exclamation points. We all know that adding an exclamation point can spice up the most over-masticated and trite cliches. "See you tonight." becomes "See you tonight!", "Hello," becomes "Hello!", "I had a nice time" becomes "I had a nice time!". But some of us have developed the unhealthy habit of over-using this bit of punctuational magic. In the worst cases, people write emails in which every single independent clause is exclamatory. This comes across as insincere and sarcastic. Be sure to use these carefully. The kind of emotional intelligence it takes to make emotional inferences depends on sophisticated pattern matching, and we humans are usually quite adept at it. However, many linguists and computer scientists are currently trying to train computers to infer emotions from text exactly as we do. One website is already using such technology. At lyricsg, the lyrics to individual songs are displayed alongside automatically inferred emotions, which are linked back to the anchor words which triggered their detection. But until our computers can tell us how we come across, we must be careful to censor ourselves!
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The way we write emails may reveal more about us then we consciously know. Avoid common pitfalls.
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