Per usual, our girl Joanna beat me to a post that was brewing in my mind. The other night before bed I read the widely shared New York Times article on what your punctuation says about you. Many people have had many things to say about the article (do you use hyphens, what does a period mean to you, yada yada yada) but to be honest what the article made me think about was something that I’ve been cognizant of ever since I started my new job at Food52.
I’ve had quite a few jobs since I moved to New York three years ago and at everyone I’ve learned something new about email etiquette. Between the cold yet customary “Best” to the importance of your introduction line and your subject title, one thing that I haven’t mastered is figuring out the tone of my emails.
As my friends and boyfriend can attest, I am an avid user of the exclamation mark in my texts and other communications. To be honest I usually use an extra ! or two when trying to sound not necessarily excited but more to not sound cold. My tone in real life is pretty normal, sometimes excited not always but usually positive and I feel like I add so many exclamation points to make that tone come across via text.
What I’ve noticed in my work emailing is that I do the same thing and depending on the email I’ll insert at least two or three exclamation points. The question is, why Hannah? I didn’t really notice till I started at Food52 and none of my coworkers ever had a ! in their email. It made me wonder if I was overcompensating for my tone. I sometimes feel like I don’t want to come across to harsh or aggressive and I feel like a ! smooths that over. Lately though I’ve been asking myself what’s wrong with coming across strong and determined?
What I’ve decided to do as an experiment is to limit myself to one exclamation point per email (usually refereed to the Thanks! at the end of an email) and see if instead I can adjust my tone and say what I mean in words more. To be honest, it’s been hard. I still read over my emails before I hit send and the seem so cold and alarming to me. I guess I’ll have to keep trying. I’ll let you know how it goes Hart Beat..
What about you? I would love to hear if anyone else has experience in adding too many (or two few) exclamation points in their work emails.
