'Negative intensification bias' and unintended meaning

Not an office worker and spend much less than 2.5hrs a day reading and responding to emails, but man I don’t get this at all. Maybe people just don’t send me emails that make me feel bad?<p>Slightly worried I’m constantly offending people like back when I heard that putting a period at the end of a text is the same thing as stabbing them through the neck with a letter opener.

One of the few ideas out of an &quot;employee handbook&quot; that has ever stuck with me is the idea that you should always interpret messages like in this situation - in a professional setting - with vast assumptions that the author isn&#x27;t trying to offend or upset you. They&#x27;re just conveying information.

A few years ago I had a classmate who was rudely terse in his replies to group emails. For instance, if someone asked, &quot;Here is my understanding of blah blah. Is this correct?&quot; This person would reply to all with only the word: &quot;No.&quot;<p>I was surprised to eventually learn that the person behind these weird emails was the friendliest student in the class. Apparently he just wasn&#x27;t used to emailing. To him, &quot;no&quot; was equivalent to &quot;No, sorry, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s quite right. I&#x27;ll try to follow up shortly with a more detailed answer.&quot;

The article would be way more helpful with examples. What&#x27;s an email that sounds &quot;negative&quot; but isn&#x27;t?

What seems to missing from this discussion is fundamental understanding of the mediums used for communication and why you might choose one of the other. We all know about them and yet skirt around the obvious issues with articles like this.<p>Email generally gets through way faster than a mail letter but is often thought of as being similar. (E)mail gets the text through and no more in general although it can carry pictures and other media. (E)mail is store and forward - it will tolerate delays and eventually arrive.<p>A phone call&#x2F;direct conversation is immediate and generally requires more setup cost in time and effort. If the other end is unavailable it wont work at all. Telephone calls may suffer from lag and drop outs. Vocal comms do allow subtle extra information without needing crass emojis etc. Vocal comms are much faster.<p>There are other factors such as delaying tactics and the like. For example if your work stack is too much, you can simply ignore emails for a while but an incoming call has to be answered or not at that point in time. To be fair, most people understand that non answer means try again later even if you know they could have answered at that time.<p>Emails can be sat on. Emails can also be fibbed about: &quot;Sorry, my spam filter must have eaten it&quot; or &quot;Your GMail is not sending to my Hotmail&quot;.<p>Email is also often treated as IM. The thing about IM is it is instant by design and is supposed to be a two way chat. smtp isn&#x27;t.<p>On balance: for me, I prefer telephony or direct contact than email unless it is impractical or I need a record - even then I still can record a conversation.

Here&#x27;s how I avoid any appearance of a negative tone:<p>Before I try to correct an error, or ask for anything, I always preface it with &quot;Thanks a lot for &lt;replying, doing something previously, I agree with X, etc...&gt;&quot;

I have a bias against the people who create names of biases<p>They’re making up names on the spot and we’re nodding our heads as if these are accepted academic phenomenon

See also: Every flame war in the history of the Internet.

&gt; We found people who had received the emails directly rated the messages far more negatively than did the observers.<p>I wonder, how did they control for the context? Obviously, the person who received the mail knows much more context about it, than a side observer.

Observers don&#x27;t have insight into the receiver&#x27;s perception of the senders repartee, demeanor, and past history.<p>What might be innocent to an observer may have an undercurrent only seen from the historical context of the receiver.

This is why I use emoticons :)

TLDR: don&#x27;t be passive-agressive and don&#x27;t pressure the respondent.