Issue #6

While the use of a positive tone in online communication is certainly helpful, I wonder how easy it is to convey real emotion to the customer when sending out business messages, and not just a facsimile of personal interest. The act of injecting positive flourishes into business or commercial communication reminds me of the phenomenon of the "Professional Smile" David Foster Wallace touches on in his essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". The Professional Smile is something we've all seen: it's the kind we see on virtually everyone in the retail or service industry, the kind of incomplete half-smile we all use in family photos to convey a sense of happiness or well-being manufactured for the appeasement of others (I've taken liberties with the description). The reflective knowledge of this expression's disingenuousness is what Wallace implicates as a source of despair (his word, not mine) for many individuals, while adding that an employee's lack of a Professional Smile can also create despair because we so often tend to conflate the Smile with inherent professionalism in the person smiling (hence the name) and feel slighted if we don't receive one. I understand the drive to create professional-looking messages, and I also understand the value of appeasing the customer with positive writing, but I could not help thinking of the desperate catch-22 of the Professional Smile and its implications while reading Gaertner-Johnson's articles. Maybe I'm overthinking the issue when I refer to the Professional Smile, but I still believe that effective communication is possible without engineering a positive tone.