Misinterpretation of the Written Word

Has this ever happened to you?

You're having a conversation with someone via instant messenger, SMS, blogs, email or letters and something one person said gets misinterpreted by the other. Maybe they took something you said the wrong way or vice versa. Maybe you or they never meant it to be 'bad' but they took it as such.

I was talking to a friend last week who is also engaged and doing the long distance thing like us. She said she hates talking to her fiance on MSN and they've had more disagreements that way than by speaking methods of communication.

It's happened to Duncan and I as well. Once I sent him an SMS which I thought sounded fine (I wasn't angry at him or anything) and two seconds later he was ringing me, asking if everything was all right between us. I was shocked and replied, "yes, of course." He thought my SMS sounded a bit blunt. I guess that's the problem when you only have a limited amount of characters to say something.

What's with this? I've seen it happening on blogs as well. A lot of bloggers are commenting on a particular post, one says something, another takes it badly (although the other blogger was probably not trying to be hurtful) and suddenly war erupts in the comments section.

Written communication has its advantages but I'm starting to see why many people prefer face-to-face or even phone conversations. This way, tone of voice and facial expressions can be evalauted to determine whether the person is joking or really being rude or nasty.

Maybe we just need lots and lots of smiley faces :)