Hyperquake Blog

You might think that your emails are perfect and that your recipients don’t misinterpret what you’re saying, but you might want to think again.

According to research done by behavioral science professor Nicholas Epley, who is with the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, people only correctly interpret emails slightly over 50% of the time.

Consider some research done by Justin Kruger, a professor at NYU, which found that people only accurately ascertained the meaning of emails (distinguishing sincerity from sarcasm) roughly 56% of the time (as the professor said “A rate not much better than chance”) and you’ll see we’ve got a problem on our hands.

It’s no secret that the issue with email communication is the context you read it in. You are in a vacuum. You read words on a screen without being able to hear the senders tone or see their nonverbal cues (anything from body language to facial expressions). This misinterpretations can lead to negative impacts on business in and out of the workplace, with business clients, as well as friends and family.

So what do you do about it?

Well, you couldcreate a program that helps deal with your email tone. Think grammar or spell check, except for tone. As the story points out, Matt Eldridge apparently was a good salesman in person, but turned people off when he emailed them and could thus not close sales. So, to deal with his issue, he created the ToneCheck program.

Apparently, the program scans the phrases in your emails for emotions and ‘loaded phrases.’ How does it know what a loaded phrase is? Well, through an initial ‘tone tolerance’ check after downloading the program, you can set levels for various emotions that you are willing to communicate.

Is this interesting? Yes. Do I think everyone needs this to help them with their tone? Not really. Sometimes you can easily determine if your emails tone is wrong by, well, just reading your email before you send it.

I mean, take this example on the ToneCheck homepage. Some people might actually write this, but I’d like to think these sort of email communication issues would be few and far between:

Bob,
You should get off your pedestal and listen to your sales team.
They do support you and will do what needs to get done.
Sincerely,
Mary

That’s pretty much the most emotionally confusing email I’ve ever read. First, it seems like Bob’s getting yelled at, then it ends with a ‘Sincerely’ which seems more sarcastic than truly sincere.

So, all in all, I guess I’m intrigued by the application. Heck, I wrote a blog post about it and a lengthy one at that. The research shows that something like this would be helpful, so I can’t dispute that. The cool thing about the program is that apparently, as more people start to use it, it becomes smarter and richer with what it can offer and catch in terms of poor tone, as its database continues to grow.

It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here. Maybe in 5 years it will even be something that’s built in to our email programs.