Emails aren’t text messages.
You can write an email as short as 2 lines or as long as 20 pages. There are no capacity restrictions. Many however, maybe sub-consciously, treat an email like it is a text message sent via a mobile phone.
When you write a letter, we try to be careful with matters such as sentence construction, spelling, paragraphing and the message that letter will be conveying. There should be no difference in writing an email.
When you draft a text message, you are constrained by a number of things. The biggest constrain is the size of your message. You are restricted to 120 characters. You can’t say much. Hence you abbreviate. U abrev8. It is a stop gap medium, until you are able to “TTYL”. :-). Cambie now – c u in 5, ttyl. xxx. Most imptly u dun risk conveyg wrong msg bcos u r c’ing tt person soon n can chat then. U r expected 2 b brief. Not ur fault if msg short n incomplete.
When you write an email however, there is no reason why you shouldn’t try to elaborate what you are saying. It is not a stop gap medium. You can of course make it that (a stop gap medium), by saying so, preferably at the start of the email . If you don’t, the reader may take what you have written as the complete message you intended to convey. Unless you say so, you cannot assume that email to be “just a quick note” without any further explanatory efforts.
So you do have to think – much as you would if you were putting words on paper to be sent out to the reader. If you don’t, and you don’t qualify it as “a quick note” to be elaborated further, the reader can and often will take the contents to be the entire message. That puts the burden on you to think through what you are writing, and take responsibility for it.
This is especially true if that single message is to be sent out to multiple recipients. You’d have readers with a whole range of knowledge of or appreciation for the subject matter of the email. A reader may have had something to do with that subject matter maybe a year ago, and another reader may have just dealt with that matter yesterday. These 2 readers will have very different mindsets when reading that email. It is incumbent on the writer to set the history, context, perspective and language of the email correctly so that the message conveyed is as accurate and complete as it can and should be.
Well does every email have to be a pedantically drafted document than? Of course not. What it must do is to accurately convey the message. It must be thought through. A well thought out email can be a 2-3 liner message, and it can accurately convey the required message. On the other hand, a 10 page email can – if targeted across a range of people for example – can be so inaccurate (or irrelevant) that it truly shows the writer hasn’t really thought through the matter properly. Worst of all, it could be wrong and paint a picture in the reader’s mind which wasn’t true at all.
I suppose if a wrong message has been conveyed you then try to re-send a correct or correcting one. In the meantime however if that wrong message has been sent to say, 6 persons, you may already have a number of responses all seeking clarifications or further information. If each of the 6 recipients asked a question and then follow up with some information, you’d have potentially a dozen or so follow up messages.
In a way the ease of hacking away on a keyboard and clicking on a mouse has made many of us a lot more careless with our writing. We appear to think less. Maybe it is because the uniformity of the letters represented by the font, the straightness of each line, and the neatness of the whole write-up tend to suggest things are ok. Maybe it is the sheer numbers – the number of people having access to a writing tool must have exploded – the number of people writing less than perfectly has just gone off the charts. An inability to write properly has become a lesser inhibition for someone to pen something and click the “send” button. Someone once said any idiot can look smart with a spreadsheet. Unfortunately it looks like this is also true for word processor or an email account. Suddenly, anyone with access to these tools is inclined to write. And unless you’re a Uighur or live in the Kalahari, who wouldn’t have access to these tools today?
Email malaise. Modern communication tools malaise.
Ante 