One of the great dangers of email and texting is the misunderstanding that comes from your witty comment being taken seriously by the dope on the receiving end of your cleverness.  I mean, how could someone fail to understand that I was just being funny?  How dumb can he be?  And yet, that misunderstanding happens all the time.

Beyond cleverness, misunderstandings develop from emails and texts that are too telegraphic, from emails that go on too long so that they’re not read, and from texts whose supposedly clear instructions somehow get misconstrued, leading to squads of people turning right when they were supposed to turn left, and so on.

We humans are hard-wired to decode each other’s intent – when we’re communicating face-to-face.  All of the advantages of the virtual word – it’s easy, free, and you don’t have to be standing there when I type out my brilliant missive to you – also contribute to its flaws.  Without the face-to-face presence, I can’t perform two incredibly important checks on what you’re saying to me or vice-versa:  I can’t easily check for accuracy, and I can’t check for emotional importance.

Face to face we can ask for clarification, say, “did you really mean that?” and otherwise confirm that the order to march off the cliff was exactly that.  I can also, pretty much instantly and effortlessly, get a sense of how important you believe your communication is – because you convey emotional import automatically along with the content.  Your body language signals how much you care.  Your body language also signals highs and lows and other nuances in your communication, so your presence aids in simple comprehension, too.  But the most important thing that face-to-face communication provides is the emotional subtext to your content.

It’s important to realize that first, you can’t help signaling your emotional subtext and second, I can’t help receiving it.

Put that communication into an email or a text (or Slack or Teams or other alternative) and the emotional subtext disappears, for the most part.  Because I’m not used to conveying my emotions with mere words, lacking Shakespeare’s facility with the language, my prose is liable to fall a bit flat.  Or I feel inhibited from adding phrases to clarify my emotional rating of the email, like, “This is really, really, really important to me.”  And in any case, would you take that literally, or sense a bit of irony in that last sentence?  Who knows – and that’s the point.

Lacking the face-to-face body language exchange, the virtual written word is an impoverished form of communication.  Language is imprecise and our command of it even more so, and thus email is fraught with danger.

And so most people have taken to adding all sorts of diacritical marks, abbreviations, and symbols in order to aid in comprehension.  For example:  !!!!!.  The exclamation point to show you’re being friendly.  It adds a chirpy tone.  So lots of emails and texts I get involve sentence after sentence like this! Every single one! As a result, the device starts to lose its effectiveness!

The better way to clarity your missives involve emojis.  Originally scorned by serious grownups, they now have found their way into the semi-polite discourse of business communications.:-)

Studies show widespread use of emojis in internal corporate messaging, especially instant messaging and team chat platforms, with many professionals using them to clarify tone or add affective cues.

Surveys also indicate a large majority of employees don’t view emojis as unprofessional per se, but rather appropriate depending on relationship and context.

There are limits to this new freedom to emoj.  You might not want to use them with customers, depending on the relationship, and usage certainly varies with industry and corporate culture.

So here’s the email and text bottom line: use emojis – particularly a few basic ones – appropriately, in order to clarify your emotional meaning, or just to come across as warmer, and you may save a great deal of explaining down the road.