I thought this article about email sign-offs was a bit of a filler piece for the Post Thanksgiving Monday until it happened to me today.

This morning, after exchanging a string of one-line question and response emails with a colleague (I would also like to blame it on my head cold), I simply forgot to add the niceties that typically go along with an email to anyone outside of the office.

In response to a very helpful email I received from a professional contact outside of the office, I wrote:

“i’ll look there. thanks.”

I did not greet the recipient by name. I did not sign off with a traditional “Best”, “Kind Regards”, or even “Sincerely”. Hell… I didn’t even give my fragments (let’s face it they weren’t sentences) the proper capitalization.

I didn’t even notice my mistake until the recipient replied and nearly apologized for his previous email. It was clear, though he didn’t say it outright, that he thought that I had taken offense to his prior note. Why else would I have been so terse?

It’s at times like these that I am reminded that, while digital modes of communication (email, IM, blogs, etc) make it so much easier to connect, they require much more care and attention than we typically give them. We have only begun to develop nascent tools in the digital realm (think and LOL) to solve the problems which non-verbal cues, tone and timbre have been smoothing over for generations in our face to face (and voice to voice) interactions.