Tuesday, February 22, 2011

I’m wondering if any of the rest of you have conversations with friends, etc about how challenging it can be to make one’s self fully understood when writing emails, typing texts or conversing via the internet. Recently, a good number of my friends and I have shared times when our intent was misunderstood by the recipient. The results were hurt feelings or the person reacting in a defensive manner, thinking we were angered or lashing out at them.

So how do we go about making our point clear? Many, myself included, have resorted to actually writing out our emotions in parentheses, following certain statements. And then there’s a whole other issue of when someone thinks you’re upset and shouting at them because you put a word in all caps, meaning to emphasize but not “yell” it at them.

Under the best of circumstances, communication can be challenging. But when we take out the face-to-face element and replace it with writing messages back and forth electronically, things can get…well, frankly…they can get rather messy.

So how do we avoid falling into the uncomfortable potholes of miscommunication? I’m not sure that’s entirely possible. But we can reduce the number of instances if we take the time to slow down when communicating with others via written form. If before we hit the send button, we take an extra minute or two to read back what we’ve written to ensure, as best we can, that it accurately conveys what we intended to say, then things should go smoother. In reality, they won’t always go as we had hoped. And in those cases, the best we can do is reach out to the person and try to make ourselves better understood.

With how society is leaning more and more heavily on electronic forms of communications, this is no longer an option but rather a necessity.