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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to mind your manners online. It is easy to be a little more curt and a little less courteous from behind a screen.

But communication is still communication. People are still people. A little niceness goes a long way.

So I recently read Charles Duhigg's new book, Super Communicators. Over the past few weeks,

I shared a few tips from the book. Today's tip comes from something he mentions just in passing. Then in one study, all it took was

adding the words, thank you, and please, to a series of online arguments, while everything else stayed the same, to reduce tensions.

This is fascinating, but not really that surprising. It is hard to read emotions and context into printed words.

When someone is speaking, we pick up on all sorts of nonverbal cues, but those are completely

absent in most online communication. People read sarcasm as real emotion.

It is easy to choose the least charitable explanation for whatever is said.

But the words please and thank you change that entirely.

If you say thank you for sharing that and then say why you disagree with a previous comment, it comes across less as a personal attack, and more like a calm debate. Asking a question

and then saying, please let me know, comes across as a reasonable request,

rather than a demand. Of course the temperature gets turned down. Now, I am not entirely sure that

it is worth engaging in most online debates. I am not sure that anyone has changed their perspective on something

because a stranger on the internet told them that they should.

That said, if you are spending your time engaged in online debates,

then simply adding a few pleases and thank yous in your language

might make the whole thing more constructive. And if you wind up in a debate in an online community

...