Write an email with typos or grammatical errors and you’re likely to be judged as ‘apathetic’ by the reader. That’s one of the findings from a study by professor of psychology Francis McAndrew and his colleagues at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. They wanted to find out how writing style in emails affects the judgements we make about the mood, gender and status of the author.
How they did it
The researchers recruited 166 students to take part in an online survey. They presented participants with four emails, and asked them to rate their opinion of the relationship between the email sender and recipient (supervisor, co-worker, subordinate, friend), the mood of the author (angry, happy, apathetic, confused), and whether the email writer was male or female. The emails differed in three ways: whether the message was written in the first or third person, type of punctuation, and whether typos were present or absent. The typos included five common mistakes: misspelled words, transposed letters in a word, missing commas and apostrophes, and using the wrong homophone (eg there/their).What they found
The results indicate that the third person narrative (for example, using he/she, they) creates formality between the author and the recipient, and is more likely to be perceived as angry and written by a supervisor. But writing in the first person (I, we) builds rapport and informality for most of us, making an email seem less threatening. An absence of question marks and exclamation marks makes us more likely to think an email is from a supervisor; we think an email with question marks would tend to come from a co-worker; while most of us consider the author to be a friend when exclamation marks are used.An email to avoid
Punctuation also influences our judgements about the sender’s emotional state: lots of question marks are associated with angry or confused authors, while happy writers leave a trail of exclamation marks through their emails. One particularly unpleasant combination is an email with lots of question marks that’s written in the third person (think angry boss), while exclamation marks coupled with the first person have the opposite effect (it’s one of your best friends). Curiously, an email with excessive punctuation is more likely to be written by women, according to the results.Reading between the lines
The researchers concluded that we depend on writing style to gauge the mood, status and gender of an email sender, especially when they are unfamiliar or unidentified. In face-to-face and verbal communication, linguistic cues such as tone of voice enable us to interpret subtle meanings. But with email these clues are missing, so we rely on cyberlinguistic cues – such as exclamation marks – to control how we want to be perceived in our emails. [That would explain why exclamation marks are often misused. Usually, they should be used only with interjections, for example, ‘Pow!’ – Ed.] It seems the use and knowledge of cyberlinguistic cues can only make us more effective communicators. So, if you want to build team spirit, write your emails in the first person, use expressive punctuation and avoid making grammatical mistakes!!!The post Judged by email: how are your recipients reading you? appeared first on Emphasis.