How to judge the mood of a text message or Comment | Eastern NC Now

   Based on a recent experience I had with a text message, I thought about the interpretation of mood from text or email messages.

   As we all know the context of any conversation or remark is different in written form than it is in face to face or even telephone conversations.  Inflection is easier to determine in personal interaction than it is in pure text format.

   Many years ago, my company had a speaker at one of our training sessions make a presentation about how text messages, emails or memos are interpreted by the reader. As you might expect, in an engineering company most communication is short and to the point. Most practicing engineers and technical people could not find a personality unless it was tagged with a formula.  I'm not trying to be pejorative here, but the engineering mindset is geared to facts, figures and not nuance and not social interaction. 

   On the other hand, most sales people or speakers are verbose and talkative to a fault.  That may be because their mission is to convince you of something that cannot be measures accurately. I somewhat disagree with that premise because judging a sales person is easy to do. Just look at their performance to sales quota.  It is a self-adjusting talent; you won't last long in sales if you don't meet your quota. Judging public speakers is usually done by the size of their audience.

   After many attempts to adapt to various techniques, I came to the conclusion that it was fruitless to attempt to work outside of my frame of reference.  It is up to the reader or listener to do edit or interpret our interaction. There are hints of course, like the glazed eyes, or the one word response to a text message.

   My other conclusion is that the mood of any correspondence either in writing or in verbal or visual communication is that of the recipients and not the presenter.

   For example, Asking a long question with many nuances will usually elicit a short response of just a few words, usually lacking in adjectives, adverbs. Just a noun and a verb and even sometimes no articles.  Asking a simple four word question (How is the weather?) to a talker will elicit a loquacious treatise on the subject including the cloud formations and humidity (Kinda of like this article).

   My premise that the mood is determined by the receipint is illustrated from this weblink:

•     One word replies- not interested to talk or too busy
•     Short replies as in ends in one line, and not asking anything back, or starting any new conversation- maybe busy or just replying for the sake of replying
•     Replies of more than one line and written in a pleasant way- interested in chatting, but you have put some effort to continue the conversation
•     Replies asking questions- clearly interested
•     Long replies with exclamations and emoticons- very interested

   All of these reflect the mood of the recipients and not the sender. The obvious extrapolation from that is simple:

   If you found the article boring, garrulous, voluble, effusive, long-winded glib or useless, then it is your fault and not the writers. A long delay or no reply indicates you are boring the hell out of your audience.

   This article is a result of a text conversation I sent as a text message to my better half and asked for an opinion.

Her response was "COULD BE."