This topic comes up occasionally here and I thought some of you might enjoy this new research on e-mail. Excerpted from the July 2006 issue of "Real Simple" magazine.
"Think your e-mail messages are crystal clear? Think again. Even if you avoid cryptic instant-message acronyms (and, no, not everyone knows what IMHO and ROTFL means), some things could still be getting lost in translation. In a recent study, participants sent and received two groups of e-mail messages - half meant to be sarcastic, the other half intended to be sincere.
"The recipients misinterpreted the messages' tone 50 percent of the time. The study, conducted by Nicholas Epley, a behavioral-science professor at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, and Justin Kruger, an experimental psychologist at New York University, also found that senders were sure their meaning was clear 75 percent of the time, while recipients had no doubt they had interpreted the e-mails correctly on average 90 percent of the time. In other words, both groups were oblivious to their mistakes."
Is it any wonder that we misunderstand one another so often on RCTN?
Dianne