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Agreed, some people really don't like terse emails. I actually got myself into trouble a couple of years back because of this. I've been working with Norwegians almost my whole working life, and am used to being terse, direct and honest. Aside from that, I'm an extrovert, and don't talk unless I have something to say. Anyway, then I got placed as tech lead for a UK project, working remotely. Within a week, the PM had made a complaint to my manager that I was being glib and not listening to other points of view. I had no clue where any of this had come from, and sat down with the PM to try to understand - if I'd given the wrong impression, I wanted to fix it. Anyway, we looked back through piles of emails, and in every single case it was a misunderstanding of my real intentions that was directly linked to terseness. From then on I've tried to gauge my audience better - always using salutations, using longer sentences to say the same thing, trying to be softer etc. I think by and large this has been successful, although I am finding recently my emails tend to be too long... |