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Moonsail Limited
Making Words Work For You |
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Those New Year Resolutions...
It’s that time of year again… time to throw out all those bad habits and commit to making some positive changes. To most of us the New Year represents a fresh start – the opportunity to let those past mistakes fade away and to get back on track. Traditionally we highlight the importance of keeping commitments to ourselves by listing our resolutions for the year ahead and as usual I have quite a list to work through. There’s one item in particular – at the top of the list – which I’m really going to make some effort to achieve…
I’ve decided this will be the year when I finally stop myself from writing ‘essay’ length emails.
Last week I emailed some documents to a customer along with an explanatory message. When I looked at the final email, it was long enough to necessitate scrolling down the screen 3 times to read the entire message. In this case I was attaching 10 documents to the email so I decided I was kind of justified in covering each one in some detail... hence the lengthy prose.
But often I find myself doing the same thing even if I’m sending one or two files to someone – or even no files at all.
In one recent case I emailed a customer a couple of sales letters along with a brief explanatory note. They emailed back to say they liked the letters - but did I realise the accompanying ‘note’ was actually much longer than the 2 letters combined? ‘Do I really need to write this much?’, I keep asking myself, and why do I feel so compelled to do it in the first place?
Perhaps it’s because, as a writer, I feel it’s almost my duty to write a long message – a mini-essay if you like. Almost as if I’m expecting the recipient to be disappointed with a short message - ‘hey, I thought this guy was supposed to be a writer, but just look at this short email he’s sent me here. It’s only got two lines of text in it. Not impressed !’
But I'm sure if I added up all the time I’ve spent writing these masterpieces, it would probably be several days each year… it's got to stop; let's see if I can do it.
Hope you all have a happy, successful, and prosperous 2006 - and good luck with your own New Year's Resolutions.
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