This morning I received quite a terse email from a colleague. I reread what I sent him and thought I was impartial and polite so I was instinctively peeved. My reflex would have been to fire an email back but instead I took my fingers off the keyboard and took a deep breath. Then I called the colleague and explained again what I had said. Got it cleared up in less than a minute.

Similar to what I talked about in “Blogging Responsibly“, a lack of visual and tonal cues impairs all forms of electronic communication. Misunderstandings can easily occur from different interpretations of the same words.

Now if all of us knew that, then we would not have incidents like this one. ;)