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You send a long message. A careful one, where you rewrote the middle twice to get the tone right. Back comes one word. Ok. With a full stop. By four o'clock you've scrolled up to compare it with last Tuesday's reply, noticed the missing exclamation mark, and settled it. They're annoyed with you.
Writing can carry tone. A one-word answer rarely carries enough of it to be sure. This episode looks at five experiments on how confident people are that their meaning lands in writing, and at a second study in which readers judged the character of a sender they had never met. That second study does not flatter anybody: knowing something about the sender's situation softened the judgements that came from spelling and grammar errors, and did not significantly soften the ones that came from a short, blunt message.
The episode does not claim your one-word reply is harmless. Sometimes people really are annoyed. What it takes away is the belief that reading the message again will settle it, and it offers the cheaper thing to do instead.
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