Mind Your Tone

How many of you have ever had an email, its meaning and the intended tone of the message misinterpreted by the reader? Yeah, me too. Email is a communication tool that provides tone challenges, and it is easy to have things taken in a way that you didn’t intend.

If your message is in any way dependent on the tone being taken correctly, then my advice is “don’t use email for that message.” It’s too easy to get the tone of the email wrong and if you do, or if your reader takes it the wrong way, now you are spending time cleaning up that mess rather than focusing on the issue you wrote about in the first place.

I have one more comment on email tone. Tone is just as much about the way it is received as it is the way it was sent. The reader can choose to take tone in a variety of ways, and while it is easy for the writer to get the tone wrong in an email, I try hard to assume the best and not the worst when I read someone else’s tone.

A negative tone can be implied by the writer. But it can also be inferred by the reader. When I’m the reader, I really try hard to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. If we all did that, we’d have a lot fewer email communication mishaps. I have experienced many situations where I ended up in the middle of an email tone miscommunication, and many times part of the problem was that the reader assumed the absolute worst.

Let’s all be more careful in how we write our emails. But when we are on the receiving end, let’s also give each other a bit more benefit of the doubt.

Have a great day.

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