Fire and Knowledge

Years ago a friend of mine forwarded an email to me from the editor of a popular magazine with this comment:

Isn’t it interesting that the editor—the head honcho!—of ______ would write like this!

This was the editor’s email he was referring to:

hi _____, thnx. we love Thomas too. if u want to pitch our literary editor on a review, he’s at __________…
best -tom

I remember being amused and thinking it was a symbol of our cultural and linguistic decline.

That was five years ago. Now I have a more practical perspective on his email — he was just a busy guy, trying to get as much done as possible.

I’ve been thinking about this because over the past year, and more so in the past six months, I’ve gotten very busy. Starting Rainsong Media was a big step for me professionally, and a few months later I also founded Beacon Ad Network with a partner. Add a few other projects on the side, and you have a recipe for busyness like I’d never experienced before.

So what do you do when you have a couple hundred emails to go through every few days? If you want to actually get things done, you have three options as I see it:

1. Hire someone to check and respond to your email
2. Let them pile up and only respond to emergencies
3. Write in shorthand

Most of us do not have time to respond to a couple hundred emails with a polished response — if we did, we’d never get anything else done. And even if we hire someone to handle our emails, there will still be many to respond to ourselves.

And that’s where shorthand comes in. Instead of taking 3-10 minutes to answer an email, you can answer it in 30 seconds.

Say you dedicate 2 hours a day to email. Look at the productivity differences:

• 24 emails at 5 minutes per email (average)
• 120 emails at 1 minute per email (average)

That’s a 500% productivity increase.

There will always be emails that need thoughtful, polished responses. But most of our emails don’t — they are simply information requests that can be answered quickly in shorthand.

So shorthand isn’t a symbol of cultural decline or of lesser intellect. Let’s drop our elitist attitudes. For many of us, it’s just a sign of busyness and a desire to get things done.

Matt Perman instructs us how to write better emails. In our email-dominant workplace, good email communication skills are essential. For the love of your co-workers, please read this.

I want an e-ink writer. I want it to have a large screen, like Plastic Logic’s E-Ink Reader (shown to the right). But it needs to have a on-screen keyboard with some kind of tactile feedback — I’d be happy with a laminate overlay until they get that technology worked out. And of course it must have a full-featured word processor, as well as the ability to create and edit blog posts.

Most of all, I want to write on something that doesn’t give me a headache. Who wants to stare at a backlit display for reading or writing?

The technology exists for this, but it hasn’t been created yet.

I’m waiting.

You must find some way to elevate your act of writing into an entertainment. Usually this means giving the reader an enjoyable surprise. Any number of devices will do the job: humor, anecdote, paradox, an unexpected quotation, a powerful fact, an outlandish detail, a circuitous approach, an elegant arrangement of words. These seeming amusements in fact become your “style.” When we say we like a writer’s style, what we mean is that we like his personality as he expresses it on paper.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 288.

Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.

The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

—Chip & Dan Heath, Made to Stick (2007), p. 16

If you master the tools of the trade – the fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction – and if you bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an interesting life.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 250.

Writing that will endure tends to consist of words that are short and strong; words that sedate are words of three, four and five syllables, mostly of Latin origin, many of them ending in “ion” and embodying a vague concept.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 240.

Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or craft…. Find the best writers in the fields that interest you and read their work aloud.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 238.