Item 4 - Emoticons & Email Etiquette, Ethical Publishing, Audience Expectations, Image & Text Differences

Emoticons and email ettiquette

Many years ago, people perceive email in a wrong way because most readers are overconfident on their method of perceiving a email. The problem is that readers do not notice their mistakes of perceiving emails and they never bother to trace the sender intention. Will, a New York publisher explained different sender might change the way reader perceive the email such as emails from manager. Moreover, there is negative effect to the reader if the sender being either formal or informal, this can lead to reprimanding the reader if being too formal while informal message can lead to unprofessionalism. Furthermore, Will also explains that the way people uses email reflect the way they treat others. Some peoples are being so vague that they do not provide full information upon sending email. This is wasting the reader and sender's time in replying each other in getting the final information. Hence, emoticon has been created to explain the intention of the email users.

The main issue on this article is words can be perceived in different meaning and so do emoticon. There are many emoticons used by email user to enhance their intention while sending an email. Nevertheless, the reader can perceive an emoticon differently. According to Turnage (2007) explained that using emoticon can inflict confusion to the reader. Here is an example for further explain, a man who attached a smiley face at the end of the text, and the receiver is woman. There are many ways to interpret the email with that smiley face, firstly she can assume the sender is being friendly. On the other hand, she may also assume the sender trying to express other meaning through the email, which could make her feel uncomfortable.

In my opinion, using emoticon in emails are risky than text in email, this is due to too many perceptions from people around the world. Thus, using text would be enough to explain the sender's intention. Furthermore, Payne (2010) stated using emoticons often would lower the credibility of the email as it seems to be a less formal message, it is also common mistakes which often used by many email users. The email user should always have email etiquette in order to make your message or content credible. Emailreplies.com (2008) explained email etiquette enable a company to gain professionalism, efficiency, and protect from liability. Thus, this creates credible information and save reader's time to communicate.

Reference List:

Emailreplies 2008, "Email Etiquette", Emailreplies.com, viewed 16 June 2010, <http://www.emailreplies.com/>

Payne, C 2010, "E-mail Etiquette: A Quick Guide to Writing a Professional E-mail", Resumes, Jobweb.com, viewed 15 June 2010, <http://www.jobweb.com/resumesample.aspx?id=784>

Turnage, AK 2007, "Email flaming behaviors and organizational conflict", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, viewed 14 June 2010, <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/turnage.html>