This post not sent from my smartphone

I'm writing this post, like nearly all of my articles, on my laptop. I probably shouldn't admit it, though, and should follow the advice of Bianca Bosker, executive technology editor at The Huffington Post. On more than one occasion, she writes, she has typed out an email message on her MacBook and ended it by manually typing “Sent from my iPhone.”

Why? Writes Bosker, “The 19-character disclaimer, with its implications of movement, speed, and on-the-fly response, not only excuses typos, but offers a free pass on including any sort of detail or depth to a message.”

See cites a 2012 study by Caleb T. Carr and Chad Stefaniak published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research titled “Sent from My iPhone: The Medium and Message as Cues of Sender Professionalism in Mobile Telephony” in which the authors asked students to assess messages based on grammatical accuracy and “…cues reflecting the transmission medium (i.e., a message's mobile signature block).”

Clive Thompson at Collision Detection succinctly summarizes the results of the study: “When the message had correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, the sender was rated as being very credible—and there was little difference between whether the email seemed to have been composed on a computer or a phone. But when the message had errors in it, things changed: Students attributed higher credibility to the person who’d written the lousy message on a phone.”

Carr and Stefaniak write, “…results suggest practitioners need to craft a message and indicate the transmission medium strategically to mitigate any impacts on attributions of professionalism to message receivers.”

Thompson quotes Carr and Stefaniak predicting that “less scrupulous professionals” could program their PC's e-mail client to imitate a mobile device and thereby “…take strategic advantage of the error forgiveness that accompanies mobile e-mail.”