A colleague sent me a two-line reply to a detailed question I'd spent twenty minutes composing. No greeting, no sign-off, no acknowledgement of the points I'd raised. Just two sentences that felt dismissive and curt.
I spent the next hour mentally composing the perfect response. Something that would be professional but pointed. Something that would make it clear I wasn't going to be treated that way.
Then I paused. Deleted the draft. And waited until I was next in the office to raise it in person.
Turns out they'd been drowning in deadlines and dealing with a difficult HR issue. The short reply wasn't dismissive. It was someone doing their best to respond to everything on their plate in the time they had. The tone I'd read into it existed entirely in my head.
Why email makes this worse
Written communication strips out everything that normally helps you interpret someone's meaning: vocal tone, facial expression, body language, context about what kind of day they're having. What's left is bare text, and your brain fills in the gaps with assumptions.
The hostility you're detecting in an email usually isn't there. Your emotional state wrote the subtext, not the sender.
Those assumptions almost always skew negative. A short reply reads as rude. A direct request reads as demanding. A lack of pleasantries reads as hostility. None of these interpretations may be accurate, but they feel real because your emotional response is real.
Remote and hybrid work has amplified this problem enormously. The majority of professional communication now happens through text (email, Slack, Teams), which means the majority of your interactions with colleagues are happening in a medium that's terrible at conveying tone. Misunderstandings aren't occasional glitches. They're the default setting.
The Stoic principle that fixes this
Marcus Aurelius wrote repeatedly about the importance of seeing things as they are, without layering your own interpretations on top. In the context of work communication, this translates to a simple discipline: separate what someone actually wrote from the story you're telling yourself about why they wrote it.
The email said two sentences. That's the fact. The story that they're being dismissive, that they don't respect your work, that they're deliberately being rude: that's your interpretation, generated by your emotional state, not by anything in the actual message.
This doesn't mean no one ever sends genuinely hostile emails. Some people do. But the vast majority of email friction comes from tone misreads, not actual hostility. And the practice of pausing to distinguish between the two before responding will save you from escalating conflicts that never needed to exist.
What actually works
Pause before responding to anything that triggers you. Step away from the keyboard. Make tea. Walk around the room. The emotional spike from a triggering email peaks quickly and fades within minutes. Responding during the peak is how professional relationships get damaged over nothing.
Assume the most generous interpretation. Most people are not trying to be rude. They're busy, stressed, or simply not skilled at conveying warmth in writing. Defaulting to "they probably mean well but they're having a difficult day" is more accurate more often than "they're deliberately disrespecting me."
Clarify rather than escalate. If something genuinely feels off, ask a neutral question rather than firing back. "I want to make sure I'm reading this right" is a sentence that has defused more workplace tension than any clever comeback.
Switch channels for anything sensitive. If an email exchange is getting heated or complex, move it to a call or an in-person conversation. Ten minutes of talking will resolve what twenty emails will only make worse. Text is great for information transfer. It's terrible for nuance, emotion, and anything involving disagreement.
Check your own writing. Before sending, read your message as if you were the recipient having a bad day. Does it sound curt? Could it be misread? A few extra words of warmth or context cost you ten seconds and prevent hours of unnecessary friction.
AI as a tone check (this has saved me more than once)
More recently, I've started using AI as a buffer between my emotional reaction and my actual response. It's become one of the most practically useful things I do with AI at work.
When I receive an email that irritates me and I'm not sure whether the tone is genuinely off or whether I'm just reading it badly, I paste it into Claude and ask: "Am I reading this correctly, or am I overreacting? What are the most likely interpretations of this message?" It's the same "I want to make sure I'm reading this right" instinct, but I can run it through AI privately before involving the other person at all.
The results have been consistently eye-opening. More often than not, AI points out interpretations I hadn't considered: the person might be under time pressure, the phrasing might be a cultural or stylistic difference rather than rudeness, or the email might simply be poorly written rather than intentionally hostile. It gives me a calmer, more balanced view before I respond.
I also use it in the other direction. When I'm drafting a reply and I can feel that I'm annoyed, I'll ask AI to review what I've written and flag anything that could come across as passive-aggressive, defensive, or unnecessarily sharp. It catches things I miss when I'm too close to the situation.
Claude in particular has become genuinely useful for this because recent versions push back rather than just agreeing with you. If I paste in an email and say "this person is being rude, right?" it won't just validate my interpretation. It will offer alternative readings, challenge my assumptions, and sometimes tell me directly that my planned response is likely to escalate rather than resolve. That's exactly what a good work coach does, and it's available instantly, privately, with no politics attached.
This isn't a replacement for human judgement or real conversations. But as a first filter between emotional reaction and professional response, AI has saved me from sending things I would have regretted more times than I'd like to admit.
The deeper point
The Stoic insight isn't about being passive or letting people walk over you. It's about accuracy. Most of the time, the hostility you're detecting in an email isn't really there. Responding to imaginary hostility with real hostility is how small misunderstandings become genuine conflicts.
As Marcus Aurelius put it: the best response to perceived rudeness is not to match it. Not because you're being noble, but because your perception was probably wrong in the first place.