When having a face-to-face conversation, you get extra indications about the message the individual is trying to convey. This could be the tone of voice or their body language. You get none of this with textual messages. Instead there are a whole separate set of considerations.

Here is a short list of things to consider when you are next working your way through your inbox:

Text slang

There has built up a whole new vocabulary of abbreviations that can be used to add meaning and expression to text messages. It is important to know exactly what these mean. It can be embarrassing to discover that you thought lol stood for “lots of love” as former PM David Cameron discovered.

Autocorrect

The person sending the message may very well have been sending it from a mobile phone in which case some words may have been automatically corrected by the “helpful” phone. This may very well change the context and meaning of the sentence away from what the author had intended.

Tone

The tone that an individual takes in written form can be quite different to what is said when spoken.

In fact it can be quite difficult to determine the true meaning of some written words. They could be taken in a number of different ways depending on the emotion and expression applied to them by the reader. Better to read several times to see if a different viewpoint could have been expressed than sending an inappropriate response.

Emojis

These are the pictures that are popular in instant messaging that are used to convey meaning in a single icon. Similar to text slang each has a meaning that could be subjective (Check out Emojipedia for a handy ready reckoner).

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