Read The Email!

I tend to write a lot.

(This public service announcement brought to you by "No, really?")

As I'm sure most of you were aware from either work, HMB or just this blog, I tend to use lots of words when writing. (I do pay them extra for all the work, though.)  However, I don't think I use a lot of words unnecessarily. After all, if you're vocabularistically inclined, there are plenty of words out there to get an idea across concisely. (Even without turning nouns into verbs. There are already verbs that do what you're trying to do. My current pet peeve is "operationalize". Just... why? Why would you do that to the English language? What did it ever do to you? Longest running pet peeve: impactful. No. Just no. Don't do that.  Even my spellchecker agrees that these are not words.) There's often just a lot of information I'm trying to communicate.

Plus, I really just enjoy writing convoluted sentences sometimes.

There is a method to my moderately meandering madness, though.  (Aside from alliteration and asides, albeit.)

I once heard that there are two methods of explaining something. One is to jump straight to the point, and only include background as needed. The other is to start with the background, and then gradually make your way to the point you're trying to get across. As you might guess, I tend to mostly use the second method, although I can use the first if I really need someone to do something and I don't want them to not actually notice the request.  When it comes to storytelling, I find the buildup helpful, and when it comes to answering questions, I find that the background helps keep people from jumping to inaccurate conclusions.

I've been told I'm a decent teacher (on a purely amateur, one-on-one basis; I claim no classroom expertise whatsoever), in large part because of my willingness and ability to clearly convey large amounts of information. So while I may suck at small talk, I don't suck at explaining things, especially in written form.

Therefore, it annoys the everliving heck out of me when someone asks a question that clearly indicates that they didn't read what I wrote. It's one thing, obviously, if I accidentally left out crucial information. That doesn't happen all that often, but it's been known to occur on occasion.  But I usually don't, and generally the information that they're asking about is clearly (and often prominently, since I know what the important stuff is) spelled out in the email already.

So why the heck did I waste all that time carefully crafting an email giving you all the information you needed, if you're not going to read the darn thing?!? Is reading comprehension so hard? Or have we all just gotten used to two-line emails that barely convey anything?

Dang it, my emails are masterpieces! They're constructed with specific thought given to priority of information and requests, background information needed or which might be useful to get what I actually want, and often a dash of "here's some helpful instruction that will let you do this on your own next time", because while I like being indispensable, it's better for the company if more people know more things.

And, of course, there's no polite way to say, "Try again, and actually read this time." (And oh, there are some people I'd like to say that to.) Instead, if I'm feeling snarky, I'm stuck saying something like, "As indicated below...", and then reiterating the relevant information, because I'm darn well not going to not get the point across that I already said this and it's not my fault if they didn't read.

Fortunately, you, my dear readers, do not vex me so, although that may simply be because you're not reading this far to begin with and you're not really responding to my posts, so I don't know that you're not reading this far. But man. Some people, man. Some people.

Some people just need to read the bloody email.

(Fun fact: I actually started this post shortly after the small talk post, and the title was originally the line about not sucking at explaining things, to get a nice parallel going. However, I couldn't really make it work as a post at the time, so it just sat in my drafts until recently, when I had a particularly aggravating experience with a non-read email, and realized I could repurpose most of this old post and save myself some time.)