Emojis are good because words can be interpreted with a tone that was unintended, and can lead to all sorts of communication problems. It's small and simple, but an appropriate emoji helps convey our emotions in a way that is more difficult to in short, text based messages.
I agree about rapid short messages, I hate receiving 8 notifications about 1 short paragraph of text.
To me, it also feels less professional, but this thread has opened my eyes to this bias I have. So I am going to attempt to make less of a judgement on this moving forward.
An example is responding back to a message with "Ok.". I see many over, say, 50 do this much more often, but to many under, say 30, this is taken as very passive aggressive.
I can see how some might take a single "Ok." that way, but it probably really does depend a lot on context and the nature of the relationship. I tend to acknowledge most people's comments in a very mater-of-fact manner, but I feel adding a simple "thank you" (as in "Ok, thank you.") helps to dispel the raw bluntness of a plain "Ok."
"Please", "sorry", and "thank you"--these magic words can work wonders.
Definitely have experienced this.
> shear
sheer
> What one things is clear communication with no ambiguity, another might disagree.
thinks
> todays
today's
> age combined with the lines being blurred between work and home makes
age, combined with the lines being blurred between work and home, makes
> I think with just the... ...makes communication rapidly evolve
I think just the... ...makes communication rapidly evolve
> over, say, 50 do / under, say 30, this
over, say, 50 do / under, say, 30 this
> passive aggressive
passive-aggressive
In Slack I find that I can use emoji in lieu of some of the positivity, if that makes sense.
If I have any takeaway from this conversation it is that I should use _more_ emoji simply because a lot of emotional context is being lost through the internet. I feel like this is especially important because I manage people and my tone can really matter.
Sure, you can add context in other ways, but it's quick, easy, and effective. Is it unprofessional? Perhaps in an email, but I don't consider every slack message something that should be "professional" in tone. You don't speak professionally to every person IRL (or, at least I hope you don't).
Well, that may be the case for some people, but I am not convinced it's the general case.
Also, how do you write (delineate, identify, etc) small, short sentences without periods?
I'm assuming people in a hurry - that don't have time for punctuation - do have time for tautological constructs? (small, short) ; )
Note: Rules are different for multi-sentence messages and single sentence messages. For messages with multiple sentences, its fine to insert periods between all sentences, but skip the last one. The above only applies to short messages with a single sentence.
However, periods were never used to end them, as absent a period it invited the reader to actually engage with the rest of the story. (This story may be apocryphal, but it sounds reasonable.)
Perhaps there's a little of that going on with people's communications where they wish to imply there exists more than they are saying (which may or may not ultimately be delivered to the reader).
For my part - as an over-30 non-American - I'll stick with standard punctuation.
oh that's easy
you just write one short sentence at a time
like this :-)
Grouping related thoughts / points as sentences within a single paragraph still feels more right to me than trying to over-succinctify potentially complex concepts into tiny paragraphs.
Also slack threads are awful, imo. I can appreciate them in certain contexts like asking what tool everyone likes or where to grab dinner, but if your slack has become a place where complicated tech answers wind up in threads it makes searching so frustrating just due to the UX. Also they’re limited, or were, on features (code blocks never looked right, etc). I HATED when outages wound up in a slack thread and not a room which was too frequent at my last employer.
That #tagging/#threading feature available on the other slack/discord/teams competitor I can’t think of right now is something I really want.
I have to pay attention to not treating slack like irc quite a bit.
It's not the use of periods on a per-sentence basis, it's just the last period. For certain demographics this evokes a tone of abrupt and unfriendly finality. But it depends on context.
