writing an email is easy.
writing an email, that the recipient can understand, is hard.
writing an email, that the recipient cannot misunderstand, is almost impossible.
but why is that?
imagine there is a table in front of you. on the other side of the table, there is another person.
inbetween the two of you, on the table, there lies an apple. but the apple has two colors: the side facing you is green, the side facing the other person is red.
for you, this is a green apple. for the other person it is a red apple. for both of you, the color of the apple depends on your view, your perspective. both of you are right – but neither of you see the whole picture.
the same is true for writing emails. you write an email with a certain construct or view of a situation in your head – just like your view of the apple – and the recipient understands what you have written from his or her own perspective.
the hard part, about writing understandable emails, is trying to change one’s view, one’s perspective, and see the situation from the recipient’s eyes – to get up from your side of the table, walk around it and sit down where the other person is sitting, looking at the apple from their perspective.
the almost impossible part of writing an mail that the recipient cannot misunderstand, is not only to view the situation from the recipient’s view, but to try to take even another step back and view the situation from all (possible) angles – to not only sit on the other side of the table but to stand up, climb onto the table and look down on the apple. then pick the apple up, turn it around in your hands, feel the weight of it, smell it and take a bite out of it.
an apple on a table is a rather simple scenario, yet it already poses a challenge to grasp the entire picture in writing. In real life you are almost never confronted with a situation that simple. Add more email recipients and you add more different views that need to be considered. And more complex scenarios/situations are way harder to grasp, even from a (or your) single point of view.
Only if you have the complete picture of the whole situation, only then you can write an email that truly cannot be misunderstood. But we live in a fast paced world and the time we can spend on thinking about how to write emails or text messages is dwindling, slowly racing towards zero.
My advice: take your time to write emails. Do not just hack on the keyboard and press send without taking the time to try and truly read your email. Read it again, slowly, and keep asking yourself the question: “Is it possible to misunderstand what I just wrote?”
Thanks for reading.
This blog post was inspired by the following tweet from @culturaltutor – it got me thinking about why I need so much time writing “good” emails at work.
