S.J. Williamson Article Review: AI to Ease Email Emotions

Welcome to the Technical Writing Success podcast from Kurt Robbins,

where we help you get smarter than your competition,

hire Kurt to coach you or your employees in AI to avoid a pink slip

or having your competition eat your lunch.

This is episode 191, I'm Fred Jones.

And I'm Daphne Blake.

This episode reviews an informative article

from Writing Instructor S.J. Williamson, entitled Artificial Intelligence

as an approach to ease emotions of email writers

that was published last July.

Right, so today we're basically examining

how email is awful.

This incredibly anxiety inducing

emotionally risky communication mode,

you know, especially for neurodiprogen professionals.

Oh, absolutely.

I think we've all felt that panic before hitting semi.

Exactly.

And we are exploring five really specific ways

that AI can actually be used

to manage those negative emotions for you.

Okay, let them pack this because I mean,

email in the professional world often feels like

walking a tightrope blindfolded like one wrong tone

and you just fall right into an anxiety spiral.

Yeah, that is a perfect analogy.

And to understand how AI can fix that problem,

we really first have to understand

why email makes us so anxious to begin with, right?

Right, like what is actually happening in our brains

when we open our inbox?

Well, it goes back to Sylvan Tompkins.

He is basically the father of affect theory.

Okay, affect theory, walk me through that.

So he mapped out how our bodies physically react

to emotional stimuli.

He identified these distinct negative effects,

things like fear, distress, anger, and shame.

And all of those can be triggered

just by reading an email.

Literally just from text on a screen.

When you open a vague message from your manager,

your brain does not just process it as data,

it triggers a literal biological stress response.

Because we are stripped of all that normal human context,

right?

You cannot see their face or hear their tone.

Exactly.

And the author highlights her specific perspective on this

as a neurodivergent female presenting academic.

Okay, so she brings a really unique lens to this stress.

She does.

Yeah.

Because for neurodivergent individuals,

communication errors might be judged much more harshly.

So the emotional risk is just, you know,

astronomically higher.

That makes a lot of sense.

The stakes are raised before you have been type of single word.

Yeah.

And then she brings in Moia Bailey's concept

of the ethics of pace.

The ethics of pace.

What does that mean?

It is this toxic modern expectation

that because you have instant access to technology,

you owe people an instant response.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, that hits close to home.

Right.

It creates what Bailey calls a false disability

and just massive anxiety.

You feel like you are failing just because you aren't replying

at lightning speed.

But wait, let me push back on that for a second.

Isn't some urgency real?

Like, how do you separate actual emergencies

from, you know, artificial panic when the clock is ticking?

That is a totally fair question.

And Langtaw and Duxbury actually did research

on this exact thing.

They found that urgency and importance

are simply not the same thing.

Oh, interesting.

So we just constantly conflate the two.

Exactly.

And Williamson shares this amazing real-world example.

Someone ignored her for three weeks on a project.

So she naturally wanted to send this super angry email.

But instead, she paused and used chat GPT

to just draft a polite follow-up.

Oh, wow.

Did it actually work?

It did.

It worked perfectly.

The colleague apologized and sent the work.

And it taught her this vital lesson of assuming, like,

accidental email burying rather than intentional maliciousness.

Yeah, giving them the benefit of the doubt even when it's hard.

But, you know, it is not just the toxic speed

of expected replies that causes stress.

It is the sheer paralyzing volume of the inbox itself.

Oh, the volume is so overwhelming.

It is just a daily avalanche of messages.

Right.

Like, you log in and it's just endless.

Yeah, you have job postings, LMS announcements,

mandatory calendar invites,

and, you know, the free food and the break room alerts.

Hey, the free food ones are critical, though.

I mean, true.

But a researcher named Ishi actually showed in 2005

that less experienced users develop real negative feelings

simply from confronting the sheer volume alone.

Just from seeing the notification numbers go up.

That is wild.

Yeah, cognitively exhausting.

But this is where AI becomes a practical relief valve.

You can use it to build automated templates

for those cookie cutter situations.

Like, sending out mass announcements for students

who all have the exact same questions.

Exactly.

It takes the pressure off entirely.

Okay, here is where it gets really interesting

but also a bit dangerous, I think.

How so?

Well, if we automate our work

by feeding real emails into an AI,

aren't we risking serious privacy violations?

Like leaking student data?

That is such a valid point.

And it brings up the concept of data scraping,

which AmeriCorps discussed in 2024.

Right.

Because the AI learns from what you feed it.

So what is the work around them?

There is a critical rule when using AI for emails.

You must completely anonymize the text.

So no names, no personal info, nothing like that.

Right.

Strip out names, email addresses, university identifiers.

You have to comply with privacy laws like FERPA

before you ever generate those templates.

That makes total sense.

Protect the data first.

Exactly.

You always want to stay compliant while saving your time.

Let's take a brief break for a special message

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Back to you, Daphne and Fred.

Welcome back to the Technical Writing Success Podcast,

where we help you get smarter than your competition

by coaching you in AI.

So before the break, we figured out how to safely handle

the sheer volume of daily emails.

But what about the hard stuff?

You mean the highly sensitive, unique emails?

Yeah.

How do we handle those ones that require deep thought

or really delicate emotional navigation?

Well, neurodivergent individuals often struggle

with information processing, right?

And that can lead to incomplete thoughts

when you are under immense pressure.

Sure. When you are stressed,

the right words just do not come out.

Exactly.

So AI actually acts as this one AM sounding board.

It is like a pure collaborator.

One AM sounding board.

I really like that framing.

Yeah, it helps translate those budding messy ideas

into polished professional phrasing

when no one else is awake to help you.

That is incredibly practical.

It really is.

Furthermore, for unique situations like email bullying,

AI serves an entirely different function.

Email bullying.

You mean where people are just openly aggressive

or name calling?

Well, usually it is a lot more insidious than that.

It is when assertive communication exploits

power dynamics to just subtly humiliate or shame someone.

Ugh, the absolute worst.

That leaves you feeling so powerless.

Yeah.

And in those specific cases,

AI becomes what Carolyn McGuire calls a social spy.

A social spy.

Okay, what does that actually look like in practice?

Well, it means observing how others navigate complex

social situations so you can calibrate your own understanding.

You learn the unwritten rules by watching.

But you cannot exactly look over your manager's shoulder

to watch them draft sensitive emails, right?

Exactly.

But AI serves as this ultimate on-demand social spy.

It models the boundaries for you.

So what does this all mean for you as the user?

It sounds like AI is basically a flight simulator

for awkward social interactions.

Oh, I love that.

A flight simulator.

Yeah, like you can crash the plane in the simulator

and practice different rhetorical responses

without actually ruining your career.

That is exactly right.

You hit the nail on the head.

Nice.

It really takes the risk out of it.

It does.

AI allows you to practice tone,

audience adaptation,

and different rhetorical choices completely safely.

Because you do not have to actually

hit send to test the waters.

Right.

You do not need a real human manager looking

over your shoulder to learn how to gracefully handle

a passive-aggressive colleague.

The AI just maps out the terrain for you.

Yes.

It can model those exact professional responses instantly.

Which is pretty incredible

when you think about the real world impact of that.

It is.

Tying it all together,

there are obviously valid criticisms of AI

out there as an industry.

Sure, like copyright issues in art

or the massive environmental impact.

Right.

Those are very real issues.

But it's use some professional communication

goes far beyond just writing words on a screen.

It actively transforms negative emotions

into positive effect.

And actually gives you your agency back.

It does.

It improves your self-esteem

and actively builds your coping skills in real time.

Which leaves you with a final provocative thought

to really mull over today.

If interacting with AI can teach us to pause,

reframe our anger,

and draft emails with genuine empathy.

Yeah.

Could practicing with AI

actually rewire our brains

to be more patient,

resilient, and empathetic communicators.