How well do you think you get your message across via email?
Back in the days when physical business letters and documents ruled (whether they were written by hand, on a typewriter or on a computer), they were taken seriously. They were often drafted and redrafted before seeing the light of day – and they were seen as the ultimate evidence of fact and intention. Certainly in the profession I originally trained for, the law, whether or not something was ‘written down’ was hugely important – and still is. If you put a promise – or an admission, come to that – in writing, it’s always been assumed to be binding, whereas if it’s ‘only verbal’, the assumption tends to be that no-one could hold you to it. Those assumptions haven’t always held up in reality, but still they persist – along with the assumptions that a piece of paper has a level of importance – even gravitas – that an electronic copy just doesn’t have.
Email threw the whole world of written communication into virtual chaos!
The plain fact (and I’m writing it down here so it must be true!) is that it always has been and always will be very difficult to get a complete message across in writing – whether in ink or electricity. Research shows that we actually manage to communicate much less than half of what we want to say – no more than 37% – when we only have the words themselves. Without tone of voice etc, the rest is lost. Legal documents try to get over the problem with their belt-and-braces language; but still, they’re open to interpretation. I once read a judgment by the infamous Lord Denning, where he started off passionately advocating one way of looking at what Parliament’s intentions had been when they drafted a particular statute and finished up disagreeing with himself equally passionately – apparently without realising he’d shifted from one side of the argument to the other!
What a lot of people still don’t fully understand is that these days, emails can be as binding in law as anything set down on paper – and they can never be shredded. Hit delete as often as you like – once it’s sent, an email is ‘out there, somewhere…’.
Laws are written and rewritten several times over – and still no-one is quite sure what they’re meant to say. The trouble with emails is that most of us dash them off in a rush, often while doing something else – and thinking about something unconnected with either task! When these spontaneous little outpourings arrive in the recipient’s in-box, they’re skim-read through the filtering lens of their state of mind – and then responded to in as much of a rush and with as many distractions as we wrote the original.
That’s exactly what happened to me on Monday. I asked a friend for some help with a work project. He answered at the end of a long day, probably with one eye on the TV and his mind on whether he could clear the other 199 messages he hadn’t yet managed to rread before the next morning brought another electronic avalanche! I can’t be sure, but I’m guessing he wrote it as quickly as possible on his new IPhone (no mean feat at the best of times!) and hit ‘Send’ without reading it back. I picked it up a couple of hours later, at the end of a personally extremely difficult day. So all I read was: ‘No – I don’t want to help you’. Now, before you glance at that and think ‘how rude!’, I have to say, the ‘no’ was his – the ‘I don’t want to help you’ was supplied by my tired and unhappy state of mind – neither of which had anything to do with the writer of the email! Fortunately, we are friends and we’ve known each other a long time, so when I read the message back the next morning, I could see it more clearly. The only problem was, I’d already answered it the night before…
I heard a similar story yesterday, in a business context (where there was no personal relationship to aid interpretation). A professional writer once had to try to give a tactful appraisal by email of a client’s documentation. He did his best, but the client sent back what the original emailer described as ‘a stinking reply’ saying “How dare you!”’.
In both cases, if the message had been delivered verbally, there would have been a lot less scope for misunderstanding. If my friend had been able to explain on the phone or in person why he couldn’t help this time, I’d have understood immediately that it wasn’t personal – and I didn’t have to feel bad about asking; and if my associate had been able to talk his client through his concerns – about the fact that their documentation was wide open to misinterpretation – , he’d had had a far better shot at taking the sting out of it. The words might have been the same, but the tone, pace – and little asides – could have made all the difference.
I hope you can see what I’m getting at just from what I’ve written? I’ve read it back and tweeked it a couple of times, so hopefully it says what I want it to. If not, perhaps I should cover it on the radio some time – or do a podcast – so you can hear what I’m really thinking!