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

0:00Welcome 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.

1:01And 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,

2:02communication 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.

3:04Someone 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.

4:06That 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.

5:07Exactly. You always want to stay compliant while saving your time. Let's take a brief break for a special message from our producer, Kurt Robbins. Hi, this is Kurt Robbins. First, thanks for listening. I truly appreciate your support. I want to let you know that I'm currently accepting new clients. My rates are affordable. And I have more than 25 years of experience working for enterprise companies like Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Oracle, PNC Bank, FedEx, USAA, and Wells Fargo, among many others. If you want to improve your IT documentation and communications, hire me. I deliver fast, know how to use AI to improve efficiency and accuracy, and love going the extra mile to satisfy my clients. Thank you for subscribing and listening. 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?

6:07You 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.

7:07Ugh, 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.

8:08Because 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.

9:08Yeah. Could practicing with AI actually rewire our brains to be more patient, resilient, and empathetic communicators.