Today we continue to explore how to comport oneself via email. The first rule here is brevity. The message you want to convey is, of course, your message, but also that your time is valuable, more valuable, in fact, than clarity, and that you are far too busy to bloviate ad nauseum over last week’s sales numbers, or even to play Scrabulous on Facebook, surf eBay for vintage fountain pens, or google your old college chums. Ideally, you don’t even have time to type properly. For those of us typing with all ten fingers, achieving the proper degree of obfuscation takes practice… results can easily be achieved instantaneously using ordinary Scotch tape. Simply wrap tape ten or twelve times around the fingers of both hands. Now type, as quickly as possible, your message. Just because email reduces our text to uniform type doesn’t mean we need to bid farewell to those happy days when the illegibility of an office missive increased in direct proportion with the authority and importance of the writer. Doctors have managed to keep this principle alive and well–just because we can sew your aorta back together under a microscope, their scrawls imply, doesn’t mean we can operate a pen with any more facility than an Orangutan. Ergo: (more…)
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