from Holly Gressley
to Andy Pressman
date Oct 17, 2007 5:14 PM
subject email prose

Andy,
We’ve talked about creating a podcast that addressed the problem of email prose. I think email would be a more appropriate venue to debate and discuss the varying approaches to email prose. What’s your approach to the art of the email?
Thanks,
Holly


from Andy Pressman
to Holly Gressley
date Oct 18, 2007 1:57 PM
subject Re: email prose

Holly

OK, our emails will speak to the benefits and drawbacks of their own nature.

I spend a lot of time writing emails. Probably we all spend a lot of time writing emails, but I mean to imply that writing proper emails takes me an awfully long time. The function of the word processor (obviously the model upon which all email clients are built) can be a bit of a curse, because it fuels the editorial mindset as much if not more than it does the act of creation. For instance, I rewrote that last sentence five or six times as I typed it. Certain words stuck out, the pacing seemed off, I saw that my grammar was clumsy – and these edits were made as I wrote the sentence, instinctively and immediately, and not upon rereading or reflecting. I probably actually type eight or nine or fifteen times the words that I actually send out in each email.

I think of this as the specific mental space in which emails are composed.

Sometimes this becomes an annoyingly self-aware process. Sometimes it can feel very natural, a spirit of writing-changing-writing that feels fluid and good, and works with the way that my mind works.

Maybe this is too broadly about writing on a computer, and not specific enough to email. Does the above apply to you? Does it maybe just apply to everybody?

Write back!
AP

from Holly Gressley
to Andy Pressman
date Nov 2, 2007 6:20 PM
subject Re: email prose

Hi Andy,
It’s been so long. I had half of this email written two weeks ago. It’s now sitting in the drafts folder in my Apple Mail application on my laptop. That’s the funny/annoying thing about webmail vs. the type of email you download to an application (i think this is called POP?). If you save a draft in your Apple Mail drafts, it won’t be instantly transmitted to the drafts folder in your Gmail, and then you have to start all over again when you’re working on another computer and killing time and decide that responding to emails is a more productive activity than constantly refreshing your RSS feed.

So where were we?

Ah, writing on the computer vs. writing an email vs. speaking vs. writing by hand. So much communication, so many processes. The differences between speaking, writing, and computing are all pretty major. In my Apple Mail draft, I started to explore these differences. I will let those thoughts lie dormant until our next round of emails. I think that the differences between word-processing and emailing are pretty minor, with the exception of one major difference: the instant send.

The instant send is a problem that affects both the function and form of the email. Being able to communicate instantly via writing – and in Blackberry land, it really is instant – changes the editing process into an insta-editing process like you described above (aka writing-changing-writing). Hence, much quality control is lost. The universality of this insta-editing process subsequently changes the form of the email itself. An email is expected to be brief, replied to promptly, and clear if dry. Emails generally lack the niceties of proper English grammar (for example, the use of the slash: see par. 1), and condensed and careless language only add to the vague nature of most emails. It can be difficult to be specific in a medium where nuance isn’t easy to convey.

The email is fundamentally different from a non-electronic letter because it is dependent upon a dialogue: send, reply. The more one writes, the less the recipient is inclined to write. An excessively long email is annoying (to me at least) because it breaks the expected form. I have to slow down; I have to read. Email is meant for scanning, and is best used as a form of documentation, the internet equivalent to a text message, or as alternative to the often-easier phone call.

I also find that when I write an email in a web browser like I am now, I find it less enjoyable than in a proper email client such as Entourage or Apple Mail. Something about going on the internet to write the email makes me want to click out of it as quickly as possible.

Any thoughts on any of this?
Holly

from Holly Gressley
to Andy Pressman
date Nov 16, 2007 1:04 AM
subject email and guilt

Hi Andy,
I have been realizing something SEVERE tonight: the email reply is tempered with guilt. With each day that passes between email replies, guilt builds. Email guilt is a problem, and it is very real. You haven’t emailed me for 13 days; for 13 days I have been waiting patiently for a response to all of these big problems I have posed to you. I wait in vain.

Email guilt is a serious problem. Perhaps you are afflicted by it?
H

from Andy Pressman
to Holly Gressley
date Nov 16, 2007 2:26 PM
subject Re: email and guilt

It’s true, that weird and heightened guilt of email. Email threads operate along their own weird timeline; they allow us to postpone our responses, but there’s still an invisible threshold of time, of appropriate delay. It varies from conversation to conversation, of course. Sometimes I’m not certain whether postponing this or that email for another day will be a day too long, but I postpone it anyway; suddenly I look up two days later and realize I’ve delayed too long. The time for that reply is no longer now.

At that point it’s a heightened guilt, a real weight around my typing fingers. To sit down and write that reply seems like twice the chore. Not only do I have to write a reasonably witty and thoughtful reply to your email, but now it has to be something special, something that justifies the thirteen (I guess now fourteen? Fifteen?) day delay. So please forgive me if I write an email of no greater quality than usual. In fact, I think it’s my obligation to those of us who want to break free from these anxieties. You know how long your grandfather had to wait for letters back from his high school sweetheart (almost certainly your grandmother, as those were simpler days)? Okay, probably less than fifteen days. Folks got letters, they took time out in the mornings or evenings to respond to those letters, then they settled into their reading chairs for a bit of Proust and some brandy.

I want to just briefly touch on your note about excessively long emails – enormity is clearly in the eyes of the beholder, but I sure know what you mean. Not because I also get irritated by long emails, but because I’m on the other side of the coin. If I had my way, correspondence via email would take on two forms: Pragmatic and to-the-point, or Discursive and informal. All our other avenues of dialogue – chats and SMS and facebook wall space etc – seem to encourage an off-the-cuffness in communication. Who said she did what when with wow!

This actually gets back to your preference of the mail client over the webmail client, and I completely agree. I hate restrained text boxes. I feel pinched just reading my own words – I feel like the interface is trying to discourage my train of thought, my looking back and thinking ahead. It prescribes boundaries on my interior space, and on the words in my head. Too much junk on the screen, too many buttons and colors and design elements. Sometimes, when I’m in a certain mindset, I’m really overwhelmed by how our communication is now taking place within the confines of design. The design decisions that exist and surround this email (which, incidentally, I’m writing in gmail) are never exactly dominant on the screen, but nor do they recede into the background. They flatten everything out – my letter and the SEND button and the blue border at the bottom of the page, all heightened by the fact that this text box takes up barely 2/5 the height of the screen.

Is this how we’re going to have to write our letters from now on? Within decorated interfaces? Where is my mental freedom, the limitlessness of my words-as-thought?

To return to the earlier point: I can’t really mourn the death of the handwritten letter. For one, I never really wrote them. I came of age with the email, and typing my thoughts feels as natural, if not more so, than forming the letter-shapes with a pen on paper. Probably more fluid, actually, considering how thoroughly I’ve internalized the use of a QWERTY keyboard. The tragedy, anyway, would be if we stopped sharing our thoughts as words sent out into the world, lengthy and darting and occasionally dumb. But I don’t feel an impending sense of doom – I think fluidness of writing will win out over the (temporarily) heavy-handed graphic user interfaces of the world, and over our culture’s need-for-speed as well. The letter will do just fine.

Anyway, sorry this was so late!
AP

from Holly Gressley
to Andy Pressman
date Nov 17, 2007 4:45 PM
subject Re: email and guilt

it seems, andy, we’ve said everything we have to say – for now at least.