Computer Column.(Column)

Byline: Craig Crossman

Sep. 12--Ever since humankind began writing, the possibility of being misunderstood has existed. This occurs primarily because when something is written, two basic elements of communication are being omitted. These two elements are facial expressions and tonal inflection. When two people communicate with each other while standing face to face, their facial expressions typically convey a myriad of direct as well as subtle additions to what is being verbally spoken at any given moment. Take emotions for example. You can speak the same words but if it's spoken with a frown as opposed to a smile, those same words such as "Have a nice day" can mean something completely different.

Tonal inflection can also produce the same results. Saying "Have a nice day" with a sarcastic tonality really means you don't want them to have one. But when you write "Have a nice day," the recipient can only know it's true meaning if the previous or subsequent sentences somehow convey your state of mind when you wrote it. If not, who knows how you truly meant what you wrote? Perhaps the circumstances before you received the written communication may help you in identifying what was really meant. In any case, over the years, additional stylizations were added to help writers deliver a more accurate deliverance.

Handwritten documents could be underlined, pressing down harder on the pen or pencil would make things darker to help convey the mood. Punctuation also helped. A healthy number of exclamation points added would make a reader sit up and take notice. Then the typewritten document appeared on the scene. But words could still be all capitalized, underscored, even double underscored, boldfaced and you could still use those extra punctuation marks to help.

Then computers arrived and with them came email, instant messaging and more. To that generation of writing we added emoticons. These first were just clever horizontal arrangements of punctuation marks to make little smiling faces like :) but people got tired of twisting their heads sideways. So we got really tiny character-sized graphics of smiling and frowning faces with tongues sticking out to further help us more accurately convey what we were trying to type. And while these continue to help us to deliver more accurate documents today, one website has added something new and clever in our ongoing efforts to make sure that what we write is more accurately understood. It's called Fuzzmail.

Reflect for a moment on how you compose an email to someone. You may type something only to realize that what you just typed really doesn't accurately communicate what you're trying to say. So you backspace to delete that word and type in something you believe to be better. Or maybe you backspaced it ...