The most difficult thing to convey in email is emotion. People frequently get in trouble for typing exactly what they would say out loud. Unfortunately, without the tone of voice as a to signal their emotion, it is easy to misinterpret their intent.

While you cannot make your voice higher or lower, louder or softer to denote emphasis, there are games you can play with text to convey vocal inflection and emotion.

Light Emphasis

If you want to give something mild emphasis, you should enclose it in asterisks. This is the moral equivalent of italics in a paper document.

Instead of:

I said that I was going to go last Thursday.

Say:

I *said* that I was going to go last Thursday.

Or:

I said that I was going to to go last *Thursday*.

Which of the above two you choose depends upon whether you are adamant about the commitment you made or adamant that you didn't mean Wednesday. (Restructuring the sentence to remove the ambiguity would be an even better idea.)

You can also capitalize the first letter only of words to give light emphasis:

While Bob may say that you should never turn it past nine, this is not Cast In Stone. It will explode if you turn it up to eleven, but anything under ten should work just fine.

I tend to use first-capitals to refer to things that are somehow dogmatic or reverential. This is probably a cultural holdover from all the capital letters that are used in the English Bible. It might not translate to other languages or cultures.

Strong Emphasis

If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation marks. Instead of:

Should I just fax the contract to your office?

No, if you do, I'll run the risk of others seeing it.

Say:

Should I just fax the contract to your office?

NO!!!! If you do, I'll run the risk of others seeing it. This property is TOO HOT to lose to another agent !!

Note that you should use capital letters sparingly. Just as loss of sight can lead to improved hearing, the relative lack of cues to emotion in email makes people hyper-sensitive to any cues that might be there. Thus, capital letters will convey the message that you are shouting.

It is totally inappropriate to use all capital letters in a situation where you are calm. Don't do this:

HEY, I JUST WANTED TO SEE IF YOU WERE AVAILABLE FOR LUNCH.

People will wince when they read that email.

EXTREME!! Emphasis

If you really want to emphasize something, you can go wild:

If you are late with your appraisal again this time, I swear upon my mother's grave that I will never, *never*, *NEVER*, >>!!**NEVER**!!<< recommend you to one of my customers again.

Use this sparingly.

Mutter Equivalents

In person, there are a number of ways that you can indicate that a communication is private and not to be repeated. You can lower your voice, you can look to your right and to your left either with your eyes or with your whole head, and you can lean closer to the other person. While these obviously make it more difficult for someone to overhear, these signals are so ingrained that we might use them even if there is nobody around for miles. Unfortunately, lowering your voice and moving your body is hard to do in email.

I sometimes write what I really think and then write down the sanitized version:

My broker/manager got fired I mean resigned today, which *totally* sucks err.. will lead to enhanced relations between ivory tower management and agents.

A friend of mine uses double parentheses to denote "inner voice", what in the theatre world is called an "aside":

My broker/manager resigned ((got fired)) today which is going to lead to enhanced relations between ivory tower management and agents ((in their dreams))

Something else that I will do sometimes to denote the "lowering of voice" is to type without any capital letters:

psssst!

hey wendy!

guess what?

I GOT THE LISTING!!!! :-D :-D !!

I should warn you that there is a minority that doesn't like the shortcuts I showed you. They argue that if Mark Twain could convey emotion without resorting to such artifice, then we should too. Well, I'm not as skilled a writer as Mark Twain, and usually don't have as many words to make my tone clear as he did. I believe that there is a greater danger of angering or offending someone by not using these shortcuts there is of annoying someone by using them.

Summary

It is difficult for most people to express emotion well in a short message. Fortunately, you can use a number of textual tricks to help convey the emotion:

• Asterisks (for emphasis)
• Capital letters
• Punctuation
• Whitespace
• Lower-case letters

Also See:

Published: December 3, 1999

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

"Ducky Sherwood's Effective Email" Kaitlin Duck Sherwood has been using electronic mail since 1974. She has also written email software, including one of the first web-based interfaces to email. In 1994, she published A Beginner's Guide to Electronic Mail on the Web to popular acclaim. Volunteers have since translated the guide into German, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), and Indonesian. She has also published a book titled Managing Your Email Inbox that shows how to deal with email overload.