Emotions are hard to convey with text, but if you understand how you're likely to be misunderstood, you can try to minimize the problem.
When you meet face to face, you can read a person's emotions. Even with a phone call, someone's tone of voice can convey a lot of information. But with email, you're flying blind, which is why it's easy to be misconstrued. We've written before about how hard it is for other people to detect emotions in email. In one study, test participants emailed 10 statements to recipients, some serious, some sarcastic. The senders thought recipients would identify the correct emotion most of the time, but in fact, the recipients didn't do much better than randomly guessing.
