Email is a great tool for being able to relay thoughts and ideas in a way that is more effective than picking up the phone and calling every person in your organization to tell them about a meeting the following day, however email does have its faults. As the article stated, emails can very easily be misunderstood, leaving the reader perhaps more confused about a topic than before. Email at best should be a short and straightforward message that conveys a clear and distinct meaning.
The author noted that more often than not decoding an email message is a guessing game with apparently most of us getting that message wrong. When writing emails we should have an "audience centered" approach. During our class discussion we have focused on writing a message, saving it, and coming back to it later to make sure that we are thinking about what the person that will be reading the message will get from our communication. It is best to make sure that we think and rethink what we are saying and to whom we are saying it to. It is my opinion that emails can be an efficient way of delivering messages to large groups of people in a quick way, but if there is a topic that someone does not feel comfortable writing down, because they are afraid that it will be misinterpreted, then it might be easier for all involved to simply pick up the phone, or stop by their office, so there is no question that the message was delivered the way that it was intended.
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