Do Not Misunderstand THIS Message

How are people interpreting your messages/emails? Are you being too formal or informal? Perhaps you're sounding harsher in some emails than what you intended?

In everyday life, we heavily rely on tone of voice and body language in order to understand another's point of view. However, when it comes to emails, the lack of these cues makes it easy to misinterpret the sender's message.

Compare the following sentences:

Do NOT misunderstand this message.

Do not misunderstand THIS message.

DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND THIS MESSAGE.

Do not misunderstand this message ^^

All these sentences have different meanings, despite the words being the same. This is why email communication can be a challenge: so many details can affect the tone of a message. Unlike in real life where body language and tone of voice come so naturally to most of us, online communication is much more difficult to grasp, even for tech savvy individuals.

Intricacies such as formatting (bullet points, sub-headers, line breaks), punctuations!!!, CAPITALIZATIONS, letter emphasisssssss, emoticons xD, text size, font, and color all can greatly affect the tone of a message which people remember more vividly than the content itself. Along with all this, it's crucial to consider word choice, sentence length, sentence structure and inclusion of images.

Do people perceive your emails the way you intend them to perceive it?

This is a tricky question, since the way you interpret your messages might be different to how another person interprets it.

A neutral tone can be perceived as a lack of interest, a sarcastic remark can be misinterpreted as offensive behaviour, and spelling/grammar mistakes can be misinterpreted for lack of care or laziness.

Misunderstandings often results in hurt feelings, people forming false perceptions of you, passive aggressive responses, poor decision making and even loss of a relationship if the situation escalates. This is why it's important to recognize how other people are interpreting your messages.

Solutions to Email Miscommunication

Just a general awareness of the email's tone rather than contents can go a long way. Reading the email to yourself helps you to recognize it's tone along with minimizing grammatical/spelling errors.

With that said, there are plenty of tools such as Grammarly which can help make you sound professional, but there aren't any tools to check the tone of your email due to it's subjectivity.

The best way to find out how other people are perceiving your emails is to simply ask them directly. There's a tool called 'Rate My Mail' which allows you to do just this. The tool allows other people to rate your emails anonymously, so they'll be able to provide negative feedback without sounding rude.

Rate My Mail was a tool developed by Hiri, a startup based in Dublin, Ireland. The tool is built into their email client called Hiri, but now, it is accessible to everyone, regardless of the email client that you use.

In order to use the tool, you must firstly sign up to their website (which is free), where they will provide you with a customizable signature. Paste the link into your email signature and your friends/colleagues will be able to rate your emails.

The tool is very handy for improving your:

• Job applications
• Impression on colleagues or friends
• General online communication (SMS, Facebook, Skype etc.)

Since this tool actually provides feedback on your messages, you can experiment on what gives the best impression. Personally here's what I find works best:

• Meaningful subject lines ("I found the answer" as opposed to "question 6" or worst "hey")
• Short, punchy paragraphs
• Varied sentence length as opposed to having each sentence the same length
• Avoiding ultra long sentences
• Treating the other person as human (after the first email exchange, using emoticons or saying stuff like "haha" generally makes them feel more comfortable).
• Being polite, even if the email is negative

Their current scale is nice, as it allows you to know about ratings from the tone to subject line, but in the future, I hope they add customizable rating scales into the tool. Regardless, I think it's a great development and online communication would be better if everyone was getting feedback on their emails.