Email’s horrible, it conveys nothing of your tone of voice. This leads to problems.

A chunk of text that you’ve written in a cheery tone can be easily misinterpreted by the recipient as snarky, sarcastic, and rude. Something you’ve sent to be supportive might be read as condescending or patronising.

I’ve seen it happen, we all have. Just recently, a friend described an email conversation and was spitting with fury at what she saw as obvious rudeness. And in the tone of voice she related it to me with, it was rude. But the words themselves were not rude, and I silently wondered whether they’d been intended to be read in a different tone altogether.

This bothers me to the extent that I’ve adopted something I call the “tone-of-voice indicator”, which I append to the bottom of very occasional emails where I believe the tone of voice they’re read in is important.

Usually these are difficult or troublesome conversations that involve disagreement. Just because I disagree with someone, doesn’t mean I don’t like them, or don’t see their point of view.

A tone-of-voice indicator isn’t new. Here’s one: :)

That’s what smileys were invented for. They were designed to add emotion to text, hence the name emoticons.

The problem is that they’ve become so ubiquitous that no-one pays the slightest bit of attention to them. They fade into the background, like the words “the” or “said”. You can insert them into controversial text as much as you like, but instead of conveying your emotion or tone-of-voice, they will just make you look like a leering, gurning loon.

What I do now, then, when the circumstances warrant it, is add the following to a message:

[Tone-of-voice indicator, because emails are easy to mis-read in that regard: :) ]

(And almost every time I use that, it is a smiley icon that I insert. Usually because I’m stating a point of view or an opinion, but don’t want to give the impression that I’m being snotty or uppity about it.)

What’s different between a normal smiley and my tone-of-voice indicator is the context in which it is presented. I make it very clear what I’m doing with the sentence that precedes the smiley. I state what I’m doing, in plain English.

Or to put it another way, I explain why I’m putting in a smiley, rather than simply littering my text with the damn things and hoping they get understood.