Check before assuming

For example

Porcupine · a tipRiley’s “fine” could mean a few things. You might ask what they meant before you answer.

How Porcupine uses it

• When a message could be read more than one way, Porcupine suggests checking before you react.
• Before rewording, it asks you (at most two questions) instead of guessing a fact it needs, like who someone is or what a reference means. A feeling your words make likely is different: it writes that in and points it out, so you can take it out (see Say what’s underneath).
• When you’re reading a message someone sent you, it offers a few possible readings, never a verdict.
• “I’ll say it in person” on any draft helps you get ready to talk, starting with a short text asking for the talk.

In practice

Why it helps

Without a voice or a face, readers have to fill in the tone, and they can get it wrong, sometimes reading a message as more negative than it was meant. Senders, meanwhile, overestimate how clearly they came across. Imagining the other person’s view doesn’t fix this: across 25 experiments, it didn’t make people more accurate. Asking them did. A voice carries the tone that text loses: in experiments, people who disagreed understood each other better and clashed less when they talked than when they wrote, though they expected the opposite. So for something a text would flatten, offering a call or a talk in person can help, as long as the other person is free to say no. Porcupine slows both sides down: senders see their words before they’re sent, and readers are encouraged to check before reacting. Porcupine follows the same rule itself, asking before it guesses at a fact it needs.

What we don’t know yet

The studies show that readers misjudge tone in email. We haven’t yet seen research on whether a nudge to check first changes how people reply. In experiments, people who disagreed got on better when they talked than when they wrote, but in studies of couples, conflicts by text ended about as well as face to face, so text isn’t the wrong way to have a hard conversation. And no study we’ve found tests suggesting a call instead of sending a hard text.

See it in a conversation

The research