Email communication
Today, email is a part of life for so many people. It is hard to believe that not even 15 years ago, the general public had little to no knowledge of email. When I graduated from high school in Nepal , and came to the US in 1995 to attend college, I was given my first opportunity to interact with email. Email wasn’t just new to me as an international student. It was new to most of my US educated classmates as well. My wife remembers going to a meeting her freshman year of college (in 1994) advertised by flyers posted all over campus saying, “What is this email thing?” and “How do I use it?” Now, email is an important part of not only college life but life for people of all ages. My grandfather who has spent most of his life in a tiny village in Nepal even knows how to log on to Yahoo.com, compose a message and send it. He learned while visiting my parents in Toronto , where he would send out messages to family across the globe and then check several times a day to see if he had any responses!!
Emailing has become a method of communication that simplifies so many things. Do you want to pass along information to someone but it is too late at night to call? Use email!! Do you want to be able to relay the same message to multiple people at once? Try email!! Do you need to get a long distance message to someone without having to pay high long distance phone call costs? Email is your answer!! Do you want to be able to have a record of exactly what you told someone? Email will do it for you!! Do you want to be able to plan out exactly what you want to tell someone, without having to worry about the wrong words coming out in the heat of the moment? Just send an email!!
With all of these benefits, it is no wonder that email is so widely used and so popular. Yet sometimes problems arise in using email. One of the big problems that I have seen arises from the fact that because you can’t hear inflection or tone of voice in an email, there can often be miscommunications. You can’t always tell if someone is joking around or being sarcastic when you read an email. Sometimes things come across sounding very harsh or blunt because you can’t use your tone of voice to soften the message.
So, should we stop using email altogether to avoid these problems? Definitely not. Instead, it is important that we remember to be extra sensitive to how things sound to the person reading the email. As we’re composing it, we should try to think of how they might interpret what we’ve written. If we are joking around, we need to be sure that it is clear that we are doing so. If we feel like the subject is a very sensitive one, we may even want to consider talking to the person face to face and saving email for more casual and less touchy subjects. That way the person we’re talking to can read our body language and tone of voice and receive the message that we’re trying to send rather than an unintended one.