Expressing Intonations

Although you can increase the volume of your voice higher or lower, louder or softer to denote emphasis in a person-to-person conversation, you are not able to accomplish this with email. However, there are games you can play with text to convey vocal inflection.

Light Emphasis.

I f you want to give something mild emphasis, you can enclose it in asterisks. This is similar to placing text in italics in a paper document.

Instead of:

      I said that the report will be done by Friday afternoon.

Say:

     I *said* that the report will be done by Friday afternoon.

Or:

     I said that the report will be done by *Friday* afternoon.

Which of the above two you choose depends upon whether you are adamant about the commitment you made or adamant that you didn't mean Wednesday.

You can also capitalize the first letter only of words to give light emphasis:

Although we usually meet on Thursday mornings, it is not Cast In Stone. If more than three of us are absent, we need to postpone our meeting

I tend to use first-capitals to refer to things that are somehow dogmatic or reverential. This is probably a holdover from all the capital letters that are tossed around in The Bible.

Strong Empahsis.

If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation marks. Instead of:

> Should I just remove the back of the computer?

No, if the temperature difference quickly changes more than 5C degrees it might explode.

Say:

> Should I just remove the back of the computer?

No, if the temperature difference quickly changes more than 5C degrees IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!

Note that you should use capital letters sparingly, as it conveys the message that you are shouting. It is totally inappropriate to use all capital letters in a situation where you are calm.

Never do this:

    HEY, I JUST WANTED TO SEE IF YOU HAD MADE ANY     PROGRESS ON THE PROJECT. STOP BY AND SEE ME AT
    YOUR CONVENIENCE.

EXTREME Emphasis

If you really want to emphasize something, you can go wild:

     If the report is late this time, I swear upon my mother's grave
     that I will never, *never*, *NEVER*, >>!!**NEVER**!!<< talk to
     you again.

Use this sparingly.

Mutter Equivalents.

In person, there are a number of ways that you can indicate that a communication is private and not to be repeated. You can lower your voice, you can look to your right and to your left either with your eyes or with your whole head, and you can lean closer to the other person. While these obviously make it more difficult for someone to overhear, these signals are so ingrained that we might use them even if there is nobody around for miles.

Unfortunately, lowering your voice is hard to do in email.

While it is a bad idea to assume that nobody will ever see the email you send, what I do in cases like this is to write what I really think and then write down the sanitized version:

    Jim got fired, I mean resigned today, which *totally* sucks,
    err.. will lead to better relations between the customers and
    his OLD company.

Erasure marking

"Erasure marks" - either H or? can be used to emphasis the muttering of text. For instance:

   Jim got fired, I mean resigned today, which *totally* sucks,
   HH HH will lead to better relations between the customers
  and his OLD company.

This type of reference can appear strange to many people. Some people use double parentheses -- (( text )), to denote "inner voice", what in theater-talk is known as an "aside":

   Jim resigned today ((yeah, like I believe that story)), which
   will lead to better relations between the company and
   customers  ((yeah, like you believe *that* story))...

Other ways to denote the "lowering of voice" is to type without capital letters, use the 'word' psssst!, and maybe use parentheses with suggestion words:

    psssst! hey steve! (( guess what? )) I GOT THE RAISE !!!    :-D

See the :-D at the end of the message, this is known as a smiley which is covered in the next section.

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