A Story of Miscommunication

I was working with a vendor who was quite terse in his emails. He came across as curt, and I started to assume, because of his communication style, that he was rude and that he didn’t care much for our business relationship.
Then I had the opportunity to spend over an hour on the phone with him as he tried to figure out a technical problem for us. Just hearing his accent explained a lot: he was from New York. If you have friends or relatives from that part of the country, you know that they communicate differently, and to an outsider, they can come off as brusque. Because of the tone of his online communication, I drew the conclusion that this guy didn’t care much about supporting us. It turns out that he was willing to go the extra mile when we encountered a real technical issue.

If you are brief and to-the-point in your grading comments and emails, you’re likely to get misinterpreted by your students.

I see this dynamic at work between online instructors and their students. If you are brief and to-the-point in your grading comments and emails, you’re likely to get misinterpreted by your students. This is especially true if you have high expectations, and believe your students can do excellent work. If that’s the case, you are going to have to explain to your students a bit about how you communicate and how you grade.

Here are a couple ways to help your students understand your tone online:

1) Send out a “How I Communicate” email. Explain how you might be perceived, tell them a bit about your expectations, and be sure to communicate your belief that they can rise to meet those expectations.

2) Send out a  “How I Communicate” video. If they can see your face and hear your voice, they will begin reading that voice into their email communications. You’ll seem less distant, and you’ll be able to overcome some of those limitations of text-based communication.

Aaron Johnson


I want to see online educators move technology into the background so that they can do what they do best--teaching. My hope is to help teachers transition from face-to-face settings to the online classroom with a sense of confidence gained through the competence they develop.

Privacy Preference Center