I read about an interesting piece of software today.
It sits in your email client, and checks your outgoing mail, like a spelling checker, for your ‘tone of voice’. It then highlights ‘issues’ before you hit send and annoy your recipients.
Well, that’s the theory, anyway – By the end, the reviewer finds: “a lot of its results downright frustrating, and it’s mission, illustrated below as transforming emotional human beings into mildly contented automatons, is downright terrifying.”
Here’s the link to the article if you want to read it – Note, there’s some ‘adult language’, although nothing too extreme ;)
Anyway, there was an interesting comment on the article, by shkm, namely:
Add emotes to anything and it becomes happy.
This is so true, in real life but particularly online, where punctuation and :)’s take the place of face-to-face expression.
Compare:
That’s great! :)
to
That’s great.
I’m guilty of tagging smiles onto the end of almost every sentence I type, either in online chats such as skype, or in emails. Basically, I’m a smiley person, and I try to communicate that in my virtual conversations.
Unfortunately, it can also dilute things.
Compare:
Just to remind you, I need the pictures by tomorrow :)
to:
Just to remind you, I need the papers by tomorrow.
I can state quite authoritively, that I will only receive the papers tomorrow. The pictures? They can’t be so urgent: I used a smilie.
On the flip side, I can say some quite blunt things, so long as I have a recipient that understands smilies ;)
I need to invoice you a lot of money for this :)
And overall, I’d say I get a better response with a smile, than without…
