Yes, I am capable of writing a brief email in a short time. I can toss off something like this in a hot minute:
Hi, all.
Meeting tomorrow –
Stage Management Seminar
Friday 16 September
3:30-5p
254 Burbank
See you then!
–risa
Sad to say, short and sweet missals are not my norm. I have been known to take an hour on an email not much longer than the one above. Ok, fair cop. I am famous for taking an hour to shoot off a few e-lines. An email containing my side of a real conversation? I can spend half a day on it.
Part of the problem is I like to write. When I have time to devote to my real writing – my fiction – emails are no problem. I grab a few ideas off the top of my head, open up the Limited-Vocabulary Dictionary, plop down some sentence fragments, and send off a note marred by strange typos and missing words. Sorry, I can’t be bothered. I’ve got better things to do.
But when I’ve no time to write what I want to write, every other bit of writing I do is forced to pay homage to my writerly frustration. My emails turn into overwrought pieces of excruciatingly precise prose. My production meeting reports have eloquence and flow. The written instructions on the homework assignments I present to my students are perfectly parsed, and the completed homework I return to them is littered with incisive commentary. Doesn’t even matter if I’m writing in English. En mis clases de español, if I’m asked to write a few sentences on a topic, I’ll turn it into un ensayo completo – con un millón de errores, por supuesto.
I like words. I like to play with them. I like them to represent my thoughts, feelings, and spirit with a high degree of accuracy. Even so, when it comes to taking hours to compose an email, my love of writing isn’t the all of it. What keeps me at the keyboard revising, cutting, adding, re-wording (re-wording most of all) is that emails are notoriously misunderstood.
One would think the same problem would have existed with letters, back in that bygone era when letters were a thing. Somehow, not, though. Letter culture was different. Who didn’t like to get a letter in the mailbox? Letters were often a long time coming. Rare ones came from very far away. Friends’ letters were written on specially selected stationary that in some way reflected their personality. Letters could go on and on, and on and on! and when they did, nobody minded. On the contrary, long letters were prized as tokens of interest and connection.
Long emails are an implicit insult. Who’s got the time to read all that stuff? Short emails are more polite, but in brevity, tone is lost.
Years ago, I was stage managing a lovely Alan Ackybourn comedy. Everyone was working hard, doing their best, but somehow my multiple rehearsal report notes regarding the need for a café table and four chairs kept slipping through the cracks. One afternoon, in my email response to a query on a tangential production topic, I said that if we had the café table and chairs, I’d be able to answer, but for now, I’d have to leave the question hanging.
I wasn’t miffed, not even a little. In my head, my tone was totally, “I’d tell you now if I could – but no worries, we’ll figure it out later.“ The way my email was read, apparently, was, “Well! IF we had the &$*@! table and chairs, I could give you a *$&#@*@! answer! But no-o-o-o… !”
I arrived at rehearsal later that day to find 3 café table options and 2 complete sets of chairs waiting for director’s approval. Happy ending, I suppose, but also a sledgehammer lesson in how powerless little pixels are to convey an author’s intentions. The subtext of an email is in the mind of the reader.
It’s that pathetic truth that keeps me editing my emails all night. I could be wrong, but the “poor me” voice in my head insists that, as a group, theatre folks are especially touchy, sensitive, and ego-driven. That gives me lots to appease in every email I write.
Being a woman, social expectations are against me as well. It’s one thing for a guy to write a terse email that could have been phrased more graciously. It’s another thing altogether for a gal to write something that doesn’t read sweet as sugar.
So, I worry as I write. How is J. going to interpret this sentence? Will L. see this as a suggestion or criticism? Sure, I’d like to cut to the chase, but I end up filling my emails with all the traditional, subservient female tropes. So sorry to bring this up, but… Hope you don’t mind if I point out… Could I possibly suggest…
Sometimes the email lands, no one gets mad, and I breathe a sigh of relief. Sometimes, after spending hours carefully crafting the least offensive email I am capable of devising, everyone gets mad, and I’m hauled onto the carpet to account for my “tone.”
I long for the day the onerous task of composing tough emails is behind me. Till then, I’ll keep mincing words.
I was shocked, I mean shocked, to learn I am using “female tropes” in my emails. Who knew—except you, who pays attention to words, text, subtext, and tone!
Yeah, it’s a tricky subject. Sometimes I AM sorry, because I screwed up. Sometimes I have an opinion to share, but I’m really NOT an expert on the subject, and maybe should let people know that. But to be constantly apologizing just because a situation is awkward or someone doesn’t like the upshot of a discussion… anyway, check out an interesting take on it here, if you like: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/women-undermining-themselves-using-words-like-sorry-truth-mohr
The other salient thing about written letters v email — once you wrote a word, it was there, no second-guessing, no multiple changes, you wrote from your stream of consciousness and since you couldn’t effectively edit, you didn’t. And strangely enough no one had trouble interpreting your intentions
Which begs the question, how has word processing affected the way we think? I’m keenly aware that my creative writing process is almost entirely e-based. I still write poetry long-hand (on the rare occasions I attempt such a feat), but that’s it. Take away my keyboard and screen, I stop writing my stories. I can’t swap back to paper and pen; it’s like asking me to write with clay tablet and stylus. So, yeah, in our youth, we thought our ideas through, formed coherent sentences in our heads, then set them down on paper. Now, as soon as I have an idea in my head, I’m typing. If I don’t like what I see, I backspace and change it; in fact, the last sentence was originally “Now, as soon as I have the start of a sentence in my head…” I went back and revised. Does this explain, at least in part, why so many people are so quick to say so many stupid things?
Ah yes, the classic dilemma. Keep it short to mitigate against egregious errors, or go full Proust and spill your life story. I suffer from the same illness. There is no cure, per se, other than to make a decision based on the recipient. Nice person? Put the kettle on. Craft a response. Ass*ole? Short and (not even) sweet. That way, the decent folk get the mails they deserve.
Nice observation though. I still have letters sent to me when I was in my teens. They didn’t have hard drives then, or if they did, they were the size of a bus. A hard drive in the seventies was Dublin to Cork. Mind you, it’s no harm to occasionally read over some of your carefully crafted masterpieces. Speaking for myself of course, but two odd things can happen. One, there was a typo in there. Really? Moi? A typo? Surely not. But yep; there it is! And two, although I can recall writing it, just about, I realise that perhaps some of the subtext has vanished. Indeed, if it was ever there. That is the limitation of email. Lost in translation. It may be a logistical problem. We can think faster than we can type. But at least when we wrote actual letters, we had to really think before we committed to the page. Anyway, just a pet theory. That I am actually making up as I type. Perhaps proving the point!
As the great Christy Moore would say:
“For all of our languages, we can’t communicate.”
This comment contains at least three syntax errors, and four typos. Can you find them all?
I feel another post coming on — “The Art of the Blog Comment” — an art Mr. Kenny has clearly mastered. Dublin to Cork, omg, I’m in stitches. Some damn fine serious points in there, too, Dec. You’ve made me realize I’ve got it ass-backwards. I’ve been going “full Proust” on my emails to a-holes and short-changing the conversations that matter to me. I’m on-board with your off-the-cuff theory, as well. I’ve been theorizing along those same lines of late. If my thoughts ever congeal around the subject, doubtless I’ll share them here. Oh, and I completely failed the test, btw. Nothing at all jumped out at me on first read. Scanning it again, all I found were a few fragments (totally legit in a comment) and a few missing commas (so what). Point taken; some text is simply not worth editing.