Email is immeasurably important to our personal and work lives. Text messaging is a great convenience.

Many of us are convinced we can’t function without either. Not many of us want to find out if that’s actually true.

I have a love/hate relationship with texting and email. They’re great tools, but both come with pitfalls, and we see them in our everyday lives.

Emails and text messages can be counterproductive when they lack a full context. The recipient doesn’t have the benefit of looking you in the eye, seeing your facial expressions, reading your body language or hearing the tone of your voice.

Those are qualities that make us human, and determine whether people like us or hate us, believe or distrust us.

Emailing and texting are an easy substitute for picking up the telephone or going directly to the person with whom we want to communicate. It’s easy to fire off a quick email asking for a particular report, or request that copy paper be added to the purchasing list.

The trick is not to not have it come across as rude or demanding.

We’ve become a nation of electronic communicators, and it’s not allowing people to read who we truly are.

And people like to read people. Every day each of us makes judgments about another person based on how they speak to us.

Over the years, I’ve been told that I’m difficult to read. I’m what’s known as an introvert — I am shy. I am not reactive, I’m not emotive.

For those who don’t know what that means, it means that regardless of how I’m feeling, I’m rarely wearing those feelings on my sleeve. I favor a rational, thought-out approach. I think before I speak.

I’m also a good listener and observer.

But, like an email, being an introvert allows for some to interpret who I am and what I’m thinking, more often than not, incorrectly. Shyness does not equate to being aloof, snobby or mean.

My personality is probably part of why I’m a fairly decent writer. It is my way of sharing who I am and what I’m thinking. When I write a column like this, it’s very personal for me. I’m revealing to you a piece of who I am.

Writing a column is one of the means I have for allowing people to get to know me better, offer a more tangible way of drawing conclusions about me.

That way, you can like or dislike me because you know me, not because you don’t.