The issue, in other words, isn’t the writing. It’s the lack of context — the fact that more and more of what we communicate is aimed at somebody we don’t know or rarely speak to, with little base line of what we’re normally like. This is true of social media audiences, but it may be equally true of a colleague from accounts payable — someone with whom we might, in another time, have been forced to negotiate some in-person rapport, but now interact with largely via bursts of typing. No amount of tone-marking seems likely to resolve our worries over this arrangement. from Why Are We Still So Afraid of Using the Grumpy Old Period? [NYT; ungated]