Play Nice With Everybody

Posted by Ken

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Has this ever happened to you? You send an e-mail to someone asking them to do something for you, or ask them a question, whatever. The point is that you get a reply from them asking you why you had to be so rude. Rude? You didn’t mean to be rude; how could they make such a claim?

For those of you who have experienced this, you know how easy it is to be misinterpreted in your e-mails. Personally, I take a long time writing and rewriting my e-mails (the majority of them anyway) to make sure I’m not misunderstood or make someone angry with me. But every now and then my efforts may fail.

E-mail, IM, and chatting are all great tools to communicate with others, but the one thing they all lack is emotion. Without emotion we miss part of what is being said, and that can lead to hurt feelings. Sometimes it can escalate to worse things.

It’s because of this lack of emotion, and the easy misinterpretation of someone’s thoughts in written form, that emoticons were created. For those of you who are new to the Web, they’re those little combination of characters that you sometimes see that, if you turn your head sideways, appears to make a little face. So if I type it looks like a person winking at you and smiling. If I type I’m conveying sadness, and >:( means I’m angry.

Elsewhere on this blog you’ll find more graphic representations of emoticons. Like or :smile:. They’re all just a way to help me convey my meaning a little better.

Look, we all say things in person that we sometimes wish we wouldn’t have said. The same holds true for e-mailing someone. So the next message you read that makes you angry, consider for a moment if it truly was the intent of the sender to sound that way. Give them the benefit of the doubt. By the same token, whether you’re writing someone just to shoot the breeze, or if you’re responding to someone that has really made you :mad:, walk away from it for a little while, and give yourself time to think it over and cool off. #

Netiquette