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Communicating Emotion Online

Sometimes how you feel about a message is at least as important as the message itself. The best way to communicate emotion is face to face:

• Facial expression lets people see how you feel.
• Tone of voice lets people hear how you feel.
• Gesture, posture, and body language express emotion.

If you need to convey emotion online, choose a medium that includes some of these clues. For example, a video chat includes all of them, but a phone call includes just tone of voice. Email includes none.

Communicating Emotion in Email

Email doesn’t communicate emotion well. Receivers often think an email message is less positive than it was meant to be. To communicate emotion in email, raise your positivity one notch.