Sad, sad news

[andrewducker]

I prefer email to phone calls. I prefer laying things out clearly and simply in text to the confusion I tend to find myself in on long phone calls, where I can lose track of what I said a few minutes before.

Which means it is with great regret that I present this graphic:



and point people towards the accompanying text.

Which illustrates nicely that people can't get it right more than 3/4 of the time no matter what they do, but email definitely makes it worse.

This has, of course, been bourne out by my experience of work, where it's definitely the case that phone calls are better for actually agreeing things, but I always follow up with an email afterwards to make sure that there's agreement in writing (for the evidence trail).

Comments

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

I have seen the effects where email was the only medium of communication used and it caused untold strife as both parties just never got their message over correctly and it all went very pear shaped after that. Not that verbal communication might have made the situation any better but I think talking might have lessened the more acidic messages a little. Once in black & white it's sometimes hard to pull back the comment straight away. At least you have that chance in conversation.

Personally I prefer verbal but it doesn't always work that way :(

[andrewducker]

The problem, I think, is that on email you can't tell when your audience has stopped following, and repeat yourself 14 times in different ways until they get it. With phone (or face-to-face) you can see the look of incomprehension and sloooow down until their brains catch up.

And in case that sounds patronising, I'm on the receiving end of this at least three times a week :->

[eleyan.livejournal.com]

this is amazingly apposite as we're just launching a new training course on communication by email and how to balance its shortcomings--I've been writing it this week.
Thank you for posting this; I'd already come across Epley and Kruger's research while I was developing the course, but this article is lovely. Particularly the graph.
It's fascinating how this was never a problem with letters: can't think of a single time when Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell flamed anybody.

[andrewducker]

Maybe it's because it takes so much longer to write letters?

Although there were numerous feuds carried out through publications over the last few centuries, so it's definitely possible.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Emails are generally poison IMHO. I much prefer to call friends. Far less chance of being misinterpreted and much easier to defuse any situations.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I think it's also been borne out by your personal life :-)

Email is great for making arranmgements, useless for conveying emotions.

[taromazzy.livejournal.com]

Heh heh.

I think I agree, it sounds likely, but I'm pished, so dont give me all the self righteous robot linguistic crap response in case I've jumped in the wrong bit.

(Surliminal sounds like she knows what she's saying).

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I think I am a little out of date. The first phase of my relationship with [Bad username or site: 'steer @ livejournal.com] was carried out by email and I make no distinction between email and letter-writing, and tend to think I make myself understood in both. Then I suppose if he hadn't understood it would have been a good way of 'screening' him before we'd made the effort to meet properly... I suspect we are both unusaul in that respect though; he is after all 'unusually socially skilled for a mathemetician'.

I don't really get on with IM as I find it too reductive, though.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Oddly the only person I've ever really enjoyed IM with is Steer! (tho my typing did degenerate to the almost illegible..)

[andrewducker]

That's not at all what it, or I said. It's actually not good for _explaining_ things. When those things carry emotional weight then misunderstanding is emoptionally fraught.


Conveying emotion isn't the tricky bit. It's just text after all, and I'm sure you've seen emotion conveyed in books a few times.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Conveying emotion isn't the tricky bit

And therein lies a mutitude of problems..

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Emotions are a physical thing. Physically generated and causing physical reactions. I don't think that they can every be fully conveyed to another - but mere words can only at best hope to hint at a tiny fraction...

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

and face-to-face is even better.

It's about emotion, of course. Easiest to pick up in person, where you are getting full sensory input, phone gives you some from voice tone, pacing, etc. with email/writing you are down to just the words - which is, of course, never enough...

[aberbotimue.livejournal.com]

if there is any help, I recon, from the 100's of mails I get, where I havn't got a clue what they are talking about, they are very badly written..

as you write well, I'd guess you are one of the email writers that do get understood..

but the feedback loop, definatly helps, when talking to folks.