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Email. Text. Facebook. Twitter.

Despite the death knell being rung for the printed word, the spoken word is not rising to replace it in our society.  We are still hovering over keyboards most of the day, it's just they are printing words in bits instead of ink.

Our move to the written, typed, electronic word is causing some confusion in context.  The limitations of 140 characters in Twitter allows for brevity in messages, but can also eliminate some essential information to properly convey the tone of the message.  Facebook lets us quickly and easily communicate with each other, but the public nature of wall postings are an open door for embarassment.  Text and email are quick and convenient, but without the proper care for the structure of your sentence, the meaning can be easily misconstrued.

Without the proper context provided by the human voice, misunderstandings in the modern age of communication are more common than in a Three's Company episode.

Here are some ways to avoid ending up like Jack, Chrissy and Janet:

Google Unsend

A feature in Google's GMail Labs, Undo Send gives you an extra few seconds to pull back an email after you hit send.

We've all done the "oh sh-" after hitting send on an email. Maybe it was an extra name added to the To: field or a sudden sense of sobriety after teeing off in a rant in the body.  Undo Send pauses the sending of messages for a few seconds giving you a quick grace period to reach back into the series of tubes and pull the message back.

ToneCheck

ToneCheck is a free plugin you can add to your Outlook to double check your email before you send it to make sure your tone is not too pushy, or too exhuberant.

You set the levels of emotion you'd like to express and then scan each email before you send it using ToneCheck (much like you would use spell check).  If an sentence is found to be too far on one side or the other of your settings, they'll be flagged to give you a chance to rethink your phrasing. 

The common focus of both tools is time.  To avoid misunderstandings in modern communication you need to take an extra pause to re-read what you've written and put yourself in the mind of the receiver. Proofread your messages for not only spelling and grammar, but emotional language as well.

It's a little obvious, but if you're not getting your ideas across easily to others, a quick scan of Email Etiquette 101 might offer up some other great tips on how to properly craft emails, texts and tweets.

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