Email tone and status: !s, friendliness, 'please', etc.

Status depends a lot on the context. There a strange idea going around that we should always try to communicate in the way that signals the highest status. That isn't the case.

On LW we had a review that suggest that one of the most useful social skills for career advancement is to appear modest. Apologizing is also important.

I think 'sorry to bother you' is a signal that you believe that the person you are emailing is higher status then you. For me that sentence has no useful information value. In some contexts I even perceive it as passive aggressive.

I've seen a claim that carefully proof-read emails signal low status, compared to a counter-signalling dashed off email from a high-status person. What do you thimk?

Signaling and status is way more complex than that. Which is unsurprising, given how important it is and has been in our evolutionary environment.

There is no universal scale of "high" and "low" status, everything is relative to the people, roles, and situation. And of course, the interpretation of various behaviors in a context changes over time as people seek to emulate or distinguish themselves from others.

If you have infinite bandwidth, you should probably develop a personal brand (or rather, a set of brands which you use in different situations or with different people). Do so based on observation of people you'd like to be associated with and distinguished from in the minds of your correspondents, and update it over time as styles (and comparison cohorts) change.

If (like me), you don't have that kind of social-mental power, just try to match your expected audience's expectations.

"Please" is commonly used as a polite way to give an order. Whenever I'm delegating a task via email, I don't say "Get this done by the end of the day," I say "Please get this done by the end of the day." I personally think it's rude to give direct orders by email without a "please" in there. This applies both to communicating with coworkers and external contacts.

Hell no!

(This is a test.)

I think the use of exclamation points should be tastefully rare, or it does give the wrong impression.

My impression is that they don't, because I haven't seen people who do this as low status. But they've all been people who are clearly high status anyway, due to their professional positions.

This is a bad template for reasoning about status in general, because of countersignaling.

What do you mean exactly by "lower status" ? Do they lower the perceived status of the writer, or do they convey the idea that the reader has lower status than the writer ?

Exclamation marks friendliness, "it'd be great if" and "Thanks!" I'd perceive as somewhat condescending in an email exchange with someone I didn't know well, whereas "you don't have to do this but" and "sorry to bother you" I'd read as delaying expressions and thus status-lowering for the writer.

But again, it's a matter of context. In an informal email exchange I wouldn't worry too much about these things.