Scott Greenfield recently featured an email exchange between a student and a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business that’s been making the rounds lately.

One email is polite and concise.

The other email is an unfocused ramble. Instead of sentence stress, the author emphasizes their points through profanity, sarcasm, ALL-CAPS, and scatological references.  Instead of proper sentence construction, the author joins thoughts with ellipses.

I don’t understand why the former author started the correspondence in the first place. Maybe the latter author is right about the issue at hand. Problem is, it’s too hard to tell amongst the many distractions and it’s psychologically harder to give credence to a person who is unable to maintain an appropriate tone for the situation.