During the lockdown when most people were working remotely, I noticed that email exchanges became more expressive. It might have been because people could not express their frustrations during coffee breaks with colleagues. You could detect the passive aggressive tone of some of the expressions used in emails. I started talking about this with my friends and collected a number of phrases that they found irritating in emails. The list is long but here are those that I could relate to and understand:

1. As per our conversation:

This can be annoying if you just had a call with your colleague and you are on friendly terms with her/him and then couple of hours later she or he sends an email starting with “As per our conversion”. You may think “Come on buddy, chill!”

How to think differently: It might be that the person wants to save the email or forward it to external sources and wants to keep the tone formal and it has nothing to do with you. Don’t take it personally!

2. Hope this helps:

You are right to feel annoyed if you didn’t ask for any help and the person was just not in agreement with what you said or asked in the email and ended the email with “Hope this helps” to tell you that what you said in your email was wrong and you are someone who needs guidance!

How to think differently: Why not reframe it to think that they were really trying to be helpful or were just out of ideas on how to end an email!

3. @mentions:

I don’t completely agree that @mentions can be annoying, because there’s a function for them and that is to draw someone’s attention in an email sent to a group of people. But I agree that this can be annoying when it’s not a group email and also when you spell the name wrong or don’t mention the complete name so you broke the function of @ and you just made your tone of email mechanical and cold. In emails, as with any other means of communication, remember that you are making human connection so when @mention is unnecessary write “Dear name” instead.

How to think differently: the person just wanted to draw someone’s attention in the email and used the function @mention.

4. thnx/GM/BR …

You get an email that starts with “GM” for good morning and ends with “BR” for best regards! Why would you write that? Don’t tell me you are so busy you can’t use the autocomplete function to finish your words.

How to think differently: the person is under pressure or likes to use acronyms. Everyone is free to think or behave the way they want, within reason.

5. To be concrete / to be practical …

This can be annoying when it is in response to your email in which you explained something and you may interpret it as meaning “What you said was rubbish and I am now going to say something that makes sense!”

How to think differently: The person just wants to build on what you already said.

I really want to know, do you also have things that at some point got on your nerves in emails? Let me know in the comments!