Re: care&feeding of volunteers LONG

>  I will read this over the weekend, but perhaps you could also provide us
>  with a summary together with your own ideas?

I promised to talk about my opinions on how to avoid destroying 
rapport over email.

I don't have a whole lot to say above and beyond what you'll find in 
any netiquette guide.  Furthermore, the list has been good about 
being respectful.

Here is what I can voice opinions on:

+ Try to limit yourself to one topic per message.
+ If somebody writes something that you think is offensive, say how 
it made you feel and ask what their intent was.
+ Use whitespace liberally to indicate intonational grouping (also 
called "prosody").
+ Give your thesis statements before your evidence, not after.

Details below, separated by asterisk-filled headlines:


ONE TOPIC PER MESSAGE ****************************************************

If you send a message with five separate, unrelated questions in it, 
there are two different potential communication failures:
	+ Your correspondent might answer e.g. the first question and forget
	  to answer the other four.  (What scrolls off of the screen
	  frequently scrolls out of short-term memory.)
	+ Your correspondent might hold off on replying until he/she has the
	  answers to all five questions -- even if he/she knows the answer
	  to four.  And the longer he/she sits on it, the more likely he/she
	  is to forget to respond completely.
Either of these communication failures can leave you feeling hurt and 
slighted that your correspondent isn't paying attention to your 
messages.  Expressing that hurt can make your correspondent feel bad 
-- guilty if you do it well, angry if you do it poorly!

So try to limit messages to one topic/question per message.

Yes, yes, this means more messages.  But the total volume of 
message-body verbiage that your correspondent has to read will be the 
same.
Furthermore, this makes shorter messages -- and people hate scrolling.
Furthermore furthermore, it makes follow-up discussion easier: people 
can focus on one topic without carrying around the baggage of all the 
other topics.

Yes, yes, sometimes there will be questions that really want to be 
together in one message.  In that case, *briefly* summarize the 
message at top and bottom.


SEEK CLARIFICATION WHEN OFFENDED *****************************************

If someone sends you a message that offends or hurts you, send a 
message back saying how you feel and asking if that was their intent. 
(Usually it isn't.)

Be sure to focus on
	*how the actions made you feel*
and not on
	what your correspondent did.

GOOD: "I was hurt when you implied that Champaign-Urbana was a hick 
town.  Was that your intent?"
BAD: "You Silicon Valley people act like there's nothing that ever 
happens anywhere else!  You all are arrogant @*(#$&@(*#$&s!"

(BTW: Andy Dent did an excellent job at defusing such an 
(unintentional!) situation in our off-list correspondence -- kudos to 
Andy!)


INTONATIONAL GROUPING ****************************************************

Intonational grouping in speech makes sentences much faster to 
understand and sometimes less ambiguous.

Take this sentence:  "In email, it's harder to build that rapport and 
easier to tear it down because of the lack of emotional-context cues: 
facial expression, tone of voice, speed of response, etc."  Ouch! 
Hard to read -- even though it would be trivial in speech because of 
the way speech chunkifies things.

Yes, yes, this sentence can probably be saved if it's broken into 
multiple sentences, but people (like me!) are sometimes lazy or 
time-rushed, so don't.

I like to use whitespace to serve the same ends as intonational grouping:
"In email, it's harder to
	build that rapport
and
	easier to tear it down
because of the lack of emotional-context cues:
	facial expression,
	tone of voice,
	speed of response,
	etc."

Something else that I sometimes do and that others sometimes do is to 
use brackets or curly braces:  "In email, it's harder to {build that 
rapport} and {easier to tear it down} because of the lack of 
emotional-context cues: facial expression, tone of voice, speed of 
response, etc."  However, unless you're talking about a technical 
point, it usually looks *really* geeky.


THESIS FIRST, EVIDENCE LATER ***********************************************

Aside from the advice to put more important topics at the beginning 
of your message, try to use an INductive style of writing instead of 
a DEductive style.

Deductive:
	evidence 1
	evidence 2
	evidence 3
	therefore, conclusion

Inductive:
	conclusion, because
	evidence 1
	evidence 2
	evidence 3

Many if not most of us spent a lot of time in learning institutions, 
which use a very deductive presentation style.  (I've read that 
students retain knowledge better if they go through a slight period 
of confusion first, so deductive is a more effective teaching style.)

However, if you don't give a thesis statement (conclusion) at the 
beginning, people may create their own conclusions before they get to 
yours... and if your conclusion is worded at all ambiguously, they 
might have a hard time getting their conclusion out of their brain 
and yours in.  (Danger!)

Furthermore, I believe that some people are fundamentally deductive 
and some are fundamentally inductive.  Deductive people can work fine 
with inductive statements, but inductive people can get lost and 
confused with deductive presentations.

NOTE: This is definitely a "do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do" issue.  I'm bad 
at this.  (I come from a family full of teachers!)  I try hard to 
structure messages inductively, but frequently fail.

(*whew*, she said, wiping the sweat off of her brow)  I'm done.

-- 
Kaitlin Duck Sherwood
Author of the _Overcome Email Overload_ series, http://www.EmailOverload.com
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