Never send a “nasty” email

Something I’ve noticed becoming increasingly common is giving grief via electronic mail. Sometimes misconstrued, sometimes completely intentional, an email can give off a very nasty vibe. You may find yourself having to apologize for an email that was unintentionally curt or abrupt, when in reality you were just giving a simple answer to a simple question. The difficulty with email comes from brevity coupled with a lack of tone or inflection. The beauty of a mano-a-mano meeting or a phone call is that it becomes personal, and there’s nothing lost in translation. An email is just as easy to misinterpret if there’s too much included, as it is easy to take offense if there’s very little included in the body of the email itself. Someone may send out an email, if it’s a yes or no question it warrants a yes or no response. They may see that and ask if I’m mad at them. Of course not, I just didn’t see the need to go into detail about some unrelated subject, I answered the question on hand. Again, we see this issue of inflection and tone. If it had been a normal conversation, on the phone or in person, it wouldn’t have mattered.

People take things out of context, it’s important to consider how someone might respond to your messages if they have a habit of misunderstanding or maybe they don’t know you that well. You don’t want to have to turn around and apologize every time someone misunderstands. Nothing excuses actual nastiness from an email. There is never a call or a reason to hit that caps key and ream someone out over an email. That kind of behavior would not fly if you were having a conversation face-to-face, ergo it doesn’t belong in an email, either. Be considerate of what you put in an email and whether or not it wouldn’t be better said in a phone call or face to face.