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It's not as simple to decode as they'll have you believe. When the written word was invented, there was a huge chasm that separated writer from reader. No one would have expected that the time span between writing and reading could have shrunk to the point it is at now, thanks to the lightening-speed of the internet, and the communication culture that evolved with it. With computer-mediated communication, reading and writing have become a tango. Text is ephemeral, disposable, spontaneous – much like real-time natural language. In fact, texting occurs at near-conversation rates. How does this alter our experience of the written word? When text communication approaches this rate of exchange, something new kicks in: emotions and fleeting thoughts get mingled with the generation of words. Enter body language . Yes, email has body language. But hold on: we’re talking a special kind of body language — nothing like the kind we generate with our fleshy selves. We’re talking a kind of body language that manifests in the peculiar and awkward medium of electronic texts, with certain relatively-new forms of punctuation (smileys, emoticons, etc.), and new kinds of formatting and abbreviations (LOL, etc). Email body language is a real phenomenon. And it needs to be fully understood. Can Email Body Language Be Trusted? Steve Tobak wrote a CBSNews article called “ How to Read Virtual Body Language in Email ”. Tobak makes several astute observations. However, he makes some assumptions that appear to ignore the media effects of email. Like so many oversimplified lessons on “how to read” body language, this article paints a two-dimensional picture of email communication, with bullet-point rules like, “verbose means pleased or happy”, and “consistently precise grammar can mean controlling behavior”. Interpreting email body language is not that simple. In fact, email is often used by people as a way to avoid emotion or intimacy. Even though email is generally more spontaneous than writing a novel or a dissertation, email is still a form of asynchronous communication: the exchange doesn’t happen in real time. An email message could take an arbitrary amount of time to compose, and it could be sent at an arbitrary time after writing it. Thus, email is not a reliable medium for reading one’s true emotions. A good writer can “fake” a spontaneous emotion. A careless writer might not be able to hold back a momentary act of rage -– or gushing praise. How do we navigate this confusing realm of out-of-body body language? Email is Not Transparent People sometimes make the mistake of assuming that a given communication medium provides a transparent channel for human expression. The only medium that is completely transparent is air (the medium by which we exchange natural language –- a multimodality of sight, sound, touch…and smell). Every other medium imposes constraints –- artifacts: media effects . In generating and interpreting email body language, we must take into account the McLuhan effect . The message is NOT determined only by the communicators. The medium is a big part of the message. Jekyll and Hyde Flame Throwers Tobak says this about flame mail: “…when you receive what we affectionately call flame mail –- where someone lets loose on you in a big, ugly way –- that’s aggressive behavior. In other words, they’re acting out like a child throwing a temper tantrum and it’s not about you, it’s about them. I know it’s tempting to think it’s just a misunderstanding, but ask yourself, why did they assume the worst?” But it’s not just “about them”. It’s also about the medium –- an awkward, body-language-challenged medium; a medium which we often hide behind; a medium in which people often express negative feelings because “it’s just words”. People can feel “safe” behind the email wall (they won’t get punched in the face – at least not immediately). There’s something about the medium that can cause people to flame – EVEN if they are not normally flame-throwers. In the book You Are Not a Gadget , Jaron Lanier gives a well-articulated explanation for how and why this phenomenon occurs. Facebook, email, blog comments, and other such venues have a way of turning people into two-dimensional cartoon characters –- anonymous agents. We fall prey to this dimensionality-reducing effect, and lose our sense of respect, intimacy, and co-presence. Being in the physical presence of others has a normalizing and socializing effect. And the absence of this natural channel of body language is harder for some people to process than others. The Dreaded Send Button Many of us have been guilty of sending email messages in the heat of an emotional moment. When writing an email in this state of mind, we feel as if we are in the middle of an interaction. Emotions have a way of stopping time. But after a good night’s sleep, the writer comes back to discover in horror that the email is now a frozen record of a momentary eruption, sitting on the reader’s computer screen, where it can be read a hundred times over. While the writer slept off the negative emotions, the reader spent the whole night fuming. What a waste of emotional energy that could have run its natural course in the span of a few minutes! No solution or magic bullet is being offered here. All that is being offered is a warning: email body language does not correspond to our real bodies. It must be generated, and interpreted with an understanding of the media it occupies: a relatively young mechanical substrate of computers, software interfaces, and the internet. Our own bodies, in contrast, are expression machines that have benefited from billions of years of evolution.

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The Disembodied Body Language of Email

Christopher Ricks, a Boston University professor in the Core Curriculum and Editorial Institute, discusses the work of Bob Dylan and considers if it better valued as songwriting or poetry. Attend his full lecture at this summer’s Alumni College on June 8-10, 2012.

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Alumni College 2012: Bob Dylan: Music or Poetry?

Before you start writing your speech, you should ask yourself these questions. It’s a problem we see over and over as presentation skills trainers – the first thing someone does when they’re told they need to make a presentation is turn on their laptop, fire up PowerPoint and begin to type. That’s wrong in a lot of ways! Firstly, the very idea of using a computer of any kind before you know what you want to say in your presentation is a mistake. No matter how good your software is and no matter how comfortable you are a using it, once you start to use a computer you have to think like the computer. Nine times out of ten, that stops you being creative and asking yourself what the best way to make your presentation is. Chances are, it’s not like you’re doing it. Secondly, I used the word PowerPoint. Don’t get me wrong, you can deliver great presentations using PowerPoint – just like you can do good things with a gun – but it’s easier to do bad things with a gun than good… and it’s easier to create bad presentations with PowerPoint than good ones. Trust me on this – I’ve sat through more bad presentations than I care to remember. If you’re intending to become a serious presenter, look into the alternatives (such as Keynote, or even Prezi). Thirdly, typing without thinking is like writing a letter without knowing who it’s going to be sent to! Why on earth would you do that? Answer is, you wouldn’t, so why risk blowing your credibility at work with such a daft idea! So what to do? Well before you even turn on your computer, there are three and a half questions to ask yourself. Once you know the answers, you can think about answering them in your presentation. Question #1: what does my audience already know? Assume they know more than they do and you’ll lose them in the first paragraph. Nothing turns people of faster than jargon they don’t understand or implicit assumptions they don’t share! Alternatively, if you assume they know too little you’re going to bore them and not give them anything of value. Either way, you look like a bit of a burk! Question #2: by the end of my presentation, what does my audience need to know? The less you tell them the more they’ll remember, so don’t go over-board here. Most experts make the mistake of assuming the audience is as interested in the details as they are. They aren’t. Generally speaking the only people who care about the details of what you’re talking about are other people who already do what you’re talking about – and where’s the margin in preaching to the choir?! Question #3: what’s the difference between the two answers above? This is what your presentation should contain. This and only this. Everything else is a distraction. Obvious, isn’t it? Yeah? Well in that case, why are so many presentations awfully bad?! Oh, and once you’re got the answer to question three, before you turn your computer on, think about the last half question – what’s the best way to tell them the things you need to tell them to answer question three? It might not involve turning on the computer at all!

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Pre-Speech Writing Tips: 3 1/2 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Turning Your Computer On

This is not what you want. Do you ever notice that whenever you are listening to a speaker, teacher or seminar leader, you have put that person in your mind as either a good presenter or a boring one? This happens a lot as an automatic reaction as an audience member. This goes to say that if you are ever to be asked to do a presentation in front of people either at school, work or at a social event like a wedding, you definitely want to do your best so that you are not labeled as a boring presenter. As a trained professional speaker myself, I can let you in on a few secrets and tricks that will help you make it over to the good presenters side rather than the boring speakers camp. Keep Eye Contact With Your Audience Many poor presenters are looking straight ahead, straight down to the floor or their notes or at the screen if using Powerpoint slides for most of their presentations. This lack of eye contact makes it very hard for audiences to have any real connection with a speaker. As a presenter, you should try to make an effort to have eye contact with all members of the audience and this includes those sitting in the back of the room as well as those in the extreme sides too. Make brief eye contact with different parts of your audience by turning your head towards their direction throughout your talk. However, do this in a natural way rather than become a constantly turning head that rotates at regular intervals. Have Some Vocal Variety In Your Tone Boring speakers talk with a monotone drone in front of audiences. This puts people to sleep quickly, especially in darkened rooms or lecture halls. Instead, try to speak with a variety of up and down tones in your voice as well as with different timings in the phrasing of your words. Make important words stand out and have pauses after key points to let audiences reflect on them for brief moments. Rushing through your talks without pauses has an effect of losing your audiences too so never rush as if you want to get your presentation over as soon as possible. Use Hand Gestures In Addition To Your Voice Good communication in front of people is not just about using your voice. Use appropriate hand gestures to further enhance certain phrases in your talks. A combination of vocal and visual elements makes for a more effective presentation. For example, if making a reference to something that is rising or going up, use your finger and point up towards the ceiling as you verbalize your point. As a general rule of thumb, the larger your audience, the bigger your gestures should be since small gestures may not be visible to people sitting in the back of large rooms. Reduce Your Use Of Crutch Words Words like ‘uhm’ or ‘ah’ during a presentation or even in normal conversation, are known in the speaker world as crutch words. They are also sometimes known as filler words since they have no meaning and people tend to use them to fill in dead space in between phrases. Try to reduce your use of such crutch words by speaking a bit slower and recording yourself during rehearsals (yes, you should rehearse your talks). Although the odd crutch word is not a major issue, excessive use of them during presentations can be quite irritating to the ears of the audience. Use The Stage Area Effectively If you are speaking from a stage or front of a room where there is enough space and you are not stuck behind a podium microphone, make good use of the available room. Audiences react better to speakers who move around the stage rather than those who just stand in one spot during their entire talks. However, pacing back and forth endlessly is not effective either. Instead, move with purpose towards a certain part of the audience to connect more with them during certain parts of your talk. You can also use movement to enhance parts of your presentation. These skills are the physical techniques that I always keep in mind as a speaker whenever I present and they will help you become a better presenter in front of any audience. Rehearsing your talks with these physical techniques as if you have an imaginary audience in front of you will enable you to adopt them more naturally. Add in good writing along with these physical techniques, you will never bore your audiences.

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5 Ways Not to Bore Your Audience

Do people trust your tweets? Twitter seems to have mushroomed overnight. The social network, famous for its mini-blogging format, has grown from a novel way to make it easier for your friends to keep tabs on you to a frequently accessed source of information. As people begin to get more and more information through tweets that are posted by strangers, concerns about credibility have begun to grow, as well. A new study from Carnegie Mellon took a look at how Twitter users determine whether or not a tweet is credible. They found that as people begin to rely more heavily upon search engines to locate relevant tweets from people they do not usually follow, they begin to be wary of trusting the content they encounter. The researchers culled their findings to come up with ways you can make your tweets more credible. The investigators began by doing a general study to determine how people use Twitter, what sort of tweets they find credible, and what criteria they use to determine credibility. Then the authors followed up their original findings by conducting two more tests in which they changed key features of tweets to see how the changes affected the posts’ credibility. They found that people find it hard to tell whether a tweet is legitimate just by reading it. As a result, users base their decisions about the credibility of a tweet on things like user names and whether or not the post has been retweeted. Study participants were told to conduct a Twitter search for information about a political candidate. They were asked to narrate their search, describing what they were doing and why. Assistants encouraged this process by asking about the tweets that were found, including such questions as whether the searcher thought the tweets were written by the candidate or came from legitimate news sources. Even though participants typically knew about such Twitter features as user biographies that help to establish credibility, they tended to pay attention only to features that were displayed on Twitter’s user interface. These include the content of the tweet itself as well as the author’s name and picture. To determine how these three tweet features influenced the way users viewed tweets, the study’s authors created tweets with varying levels of authenticity. Then they tried different types of user names and pictures representing common examples found on Twitter. For example, researchers varied user pictures for the faked tweets by inserting Twitter’s default picture, photos, avatars and logos. Their aim was to see what combination of user name type, pictures and content would be viewed as most credible by users. The researchers suggest that individual users who want to raise their credibility scores choose photos of themselves, rather than using the default picture or an avatar or logo. Topical names were viewed as the most credible, followed by names that appear to be ordinary first- and last-name combinations. Names that read like email addresses were viewed as the least credible. Keeping all tweets on the topic suggested by the author’s user name enhanced credibility, as did maintaining a strong geographical connection between the writer and the topic. For example, an author writing about the Indy500 who appears to be near the track will generally impress readers as being more credible. Using non-standard grammar and misspellings undermined credibility more than any other single factor. The authors caution, however, that in some industries or groups, non-standard usage may actually increase credibility. Other suggestions include amassing followers, posting content that stimulates retweets, including the URLs of your sources and retooling your bio to heavily reflect your topic of focus. From most effective to least effective, here is a list of features that are common to tweets that participants found credible: Tweet is actually a retweet from a trusted poster. The author appears to be an expert on the subject of the tweet. The writer is one the reader follows. The reader was able to click through a URL that was included in the tweet. The reader has heard of the author. The poster’s account has a verification seal The writer regularly tweets on the topic. The author often posts content that is similar. The tweeter uses what appears to be a personal photo as a user image. Other posters frequently refer to the author or post retweets of the author’s tweets. The researchers also noted some tweeting habits that tended to make authors appear less credible. Listed from least damaging to most harmful, here they are: The writer uses a logo as a user image. The poster follows a large number of authors. The tweeter uses a cartoon image or an avatar as a user image. The author failed to replace the Twitter default image with a more personalized one. The tweet contains improper grammar and punctuation.

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Dos and Don’ts of Twitter Credibility [Study]

From act structure to characterization, the first draft to the final product — students in COM’s screenwriting MFA program learn real-world strategies for creating the spark that starts the filming process.

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Screenwriting at COM