The Linguistics of Writing an Email Like a Boss

Hey look, it's my paper. :-)

Dunno why this caught back on now. Paper is from 2012.

This is fascinating. Unsurprised by a lot of the findings, as I see them on a pretty regular basis.

I really interesting technology offering would be an application of this used to map the "real" power structure vs. the org. chart. Imagine the power of that as a starting point in an organizational design?

Conversely, I know people who say, "Great thanks!" in threads in which they otherwise play no part. And I hate those people.

There is in fact a fairly old (1970s) linguistics theory on this subject. See e.g. Brown & Levinson on politeness theory.

You can build some fairly easy software that applies this on conversational data (1:1 emails, chats, phone transcripts, etc), and it works pretty well.

This is fascinating but I would be even more interested in actionable advice. Where is the ballance between being polite and ass kissing? Is the male / female difference in openness productive or contra? I understand that it greatly depends on the company culture, but as a non-native speaker and programmer (geek?) I usually struggle to decide how much information is appropriate in a sick day request and all my emails (up/dow/sideways) usually contain multiple "please" and "thanks". Do you know any "communication in office for geeks 101"?

Makes you wonder about the dynamics of Facebook's upcoming Facebook at Work. Can imagine the 'interest graph' of a lot of employees will be interest in pleasing their bosses. Will they spend a lot of time 'liking' their boss's posts instead of following 'useful' people? Blogged about this recently. https://tmail21.com/blog/is-social-the-future-of-work/

That was a great read, thanks!

#14 of "Phrases in Emails People Send to Their Bosses" is "shit". I'd like to see some examples of that usage.