I found an article on Cognitive Daily about how we perceive other people's intentions in e-mails. Dave Munger (2006). According to John Scalzi, you should read your writing out loud before posting it in a blog or e-mail, partially to catch spelling and other errors, but more importantly to see whether you are conveying the meaning you intend to convey.
Justin Kruger and his team conducted some experiments to see how people perceive each other's intentions in e-mails. He claims that a common problem is deciding whether a person is being serious or sarcastic in the e-mail. He wanted to know how accurately people can anticipate how readers will perceive the tone of their writing, so he tested 60 pairs of college students. In each pair, one person typed a chosen statement into an e-mail message, and the other person recorded the same statement with a tape recorder. Each person guessed whether the message recipient would perceive the message correctly as being serious or sarcastic. Then they read or listened to their partners' messages and decided whether they thought the message was serious or sarcastic.
Both e-mailers and speakers thought their messages would be perceived accurately, but e-mail recipients couldn't judge whether sarcasm was intended or not. However, people speaking sarcastic messages could accurately guess when recipients would perceive the sarcasm.
I thought this entry was interesting because we often think that what we say or write is being perceived accurately, but that's not always the case. Sometimes sarcasm is intended but not accurately perceived, and sometimes sarcasm is conveyed unintentionally.