Everyone's a Writer

Despite constant complaints and widespread evidence of bad writing all around us, I’m not convinced that the writing skills of the average person have really deteriorated that much. It seems to me that the more important change over the last decade or two is that we now expect everyone to be a writer. Just think about the changes that have happened in the workplace in the last fifteen years or so. When I left school and took a job teaching computer applications email was a relatively new means of communicating in the workplace and it often required you to memorize lots of commands that included backslashes and colons if you wanted to do something as simple as send a message. Colons! That’s enough to make anyone freak out a little bit. The awkwardness of these email programs meant that email was mainly something for the young, the adventurous, the geeky.


Even though this first “real” job was working for a company that provided computer training, email was still new enough that the company didn’t just hand out email accounts to every employee. You had to ask for an email account, and your request had to be approved by both your manager and by company headquarters in Texas. Most of the people I taught how to use Outlook or Lotus Notes worked at big companies or government agencies but had never used email. Some of them had never used a computer.

When I went to work for a law firm a couple years later email was more widespread, but we still had partners at the firm who didn’t have email accounts. In this case it wasn’t because they lacked the approval to get an account but because they didn’t want to have to learn to use a computer and to regularly check to see if they had mail. Taking care of the mail was something they were used to having their secretaries (law firms are such conservative places that they still use the title “secretary” when every other workplace seems to have moved on to “administrative assistant” or just “admin”) do for them. Frankly, they saw the idea of working with a computer and answering mail as things that were beneath them. They were lawyers, for crying out loud! Now that clients demand twenty four hour access to their attorneys and it seems as though a Blackberry is a basic necessity for anyone doing business, it’s hard to imagine that they would resist having email accounts. But trust me kids, it’s the way things were.


It wasn’t that long ago that most writing responsibilities at large companies like my firm were handled by a few specialized employees who were largely professional writers. These people, attorneys writing contracts and briefs, marketing people creating news releases and advertising material, managers drafting memos and reports on whatever it is that managers report on, were supported by a large group of employees who were expected to do little writing, if any. Secretaries were called on to interpret and type up the words scrawled or dictated by their bosses, but were seldom required to draft anything on their own.


Of course it was much the same in other kinds of workplaces. Most people who worked for a living-- clerks, factory workers, truck drivers, janitors, construction workers, salespeople-- did little or no writing. But even in professional organizations such as a banks or accounting firms there were lots of people who had no need to write. The people who worked in the mail room delivered the mail, but didn’t create much of it themselves. These days it might seem insensitive, but it probably would have struck many people as odd to think that the mailroom staff would ever need to send their own messages to everyone in their company. But now we automatically give every employee an email account and access to the distribution lists that enable them to send messages to everyone at their firm with no more effort than a click or two, no matter how big the company might be. And we give them little, if any, training on how to use these powerful and potentially dangerous tools. Most email training that companies provide-- if training includes the topic of email at all-- is focused on which button you hit to start a new message or how to send a meeting invitation. Training programs are so pressed for time and resources that important subject like etiquette, the use of distribution lists and the mechanics of writing itself aren’t discussed at all.


As bad as the email situation is it actually amazes me that we don’t have more disasters than we do, especially considering that people often don’t even seem to be speaking the same language. Take the example of messages written in ALL CAPS. When I ask a classroom of people about their top annoyances in email, this is always near the top of the list. It’s usually the second thing mentioned, right after emails that are just TOO LONG. For most people, an email written in all caps signifies that the writer is angry and “shouting” at their recipient. Even though they’ve probably never been formally taught email etiquette, this meaning is something that most people have picked up along the way. But not everyone.

Almost every time this topic comes up in class there is someone in the room who is surprised that this would be read as rude or explains that they write to an elderly relative in ALL CAPS because they think it is easier to read that way. These aren’t bad, angry people; they actually think that they are being polite and helping their readers. (It’s true, by the way, that it actually takes significantly longer to read text written in ALL CAPS. A better solution for making text more legible for aging eyes would be to set the display properties on your computer to use large fonts. But how many older computer users know how to do that?) I was surprised myself the first time I became aware of this disconnect in the way people were trying to communicate, one person trying to help and make things easier to read while the other thinks they’re being yelled at.. But why should I have been? There are whole generations of people out there who are befuddled by the use of “LOL” and winking smiley faces scattered throughout emails-- and just as many young people rolling their eyes at the old-timers who don’t get it.


Most of the time no one teaches us this stuff-- it’s something people have to figure out on their own, through context. Throw in the fact that most of us never were very good writers (or readers) to begin with and it becomes even harder to figure out what message people are trying to get across in their email. Now when I encounter someone who writes all of their messages in caps-- “THANKS” in addition to “WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO FOR LUNCH TODAY?” and “SEND ME THE REPORT BY 3PM”-- I don’t automatically assume that they’re an angry jerk (though that’s often exactly what they turn out to be). Instead, I try to gently suggest that other people might be reading their messages that way. Even better, especially if I suspect that I really am dealing with an angry jerk, I ask HR to have that talk with them.


When you think about it, someone made a point of teaching you all the forms of communication you use. Even though our brains are wired to learn them, none of us are born with communication skills. Your parents probably taught you to say “hello” when you answer the phone and “goodbye” when you hang up. Hopefully they encouraged you to say “please” when you were asking for something and “thank you” when you were lucky enough to get it. If you ever had the privilege to take a typing class, chances are you spent more time learning the correct format for business letters and memos than you spent learning how to press the right keys without looking at them. Back then the form of your message, the way that it looked, was critical to what you had to say. Writing a letter correctly showed that you were respectful and competent. When I took typing in the tenth grade Mrs. Davenport would smack my desk with a yardstick if she caught me looking at my fingers while I typed. But it was worse if you didn’t get the format of the letter correct-- she’d make you retype the whole thing until you did.


As far as I know, there are no equivalent classes for learning the correct format for email correspondence. Instead we assume that email is like all other forms of written communication. And it’s not. Even if high schools and colleges turned out graduates who were capable of writing perfect five paragraph essays-- and trust me as someone who tried to teach those kids, they don’t-- that doesn’t necessarily mean that these writers would be adept at writing email. Because with all the advantages inherent in email conversation (it’s fast, it’s easy), it also has some major drawbacks as a form of written communication. Some of the biggest are probably the very things that we like most about email.


It’s probably just too fast and too easy.


Think about those memos we old-timers learned to write in typing class. There was a lot of work that went into them. Chances are, most business memos probably started out as a draft scrawled onto a legal pad or dictated onto a tape that was then handed off to a secretary to be deciphered and transcribed. People took their time composing them because corrections meant starting over or performing messy surgery with correction fluid-- or even with scissors and tape. So there were a couple drafts, maybe several, involved in writing them. Once a document was finished, someone had to physically deliver it. If it was going to be delivered outside the firm, it would require postage. We even used to go to the extra expense of printing engraved letterhead and envelopes. Because of all this effort and cost, people didn’t just send out a bunch of stuff that didn’t need to be sent out and they didn’t create nearly as many half-baked documents that could get them in trouble. It was just too hard.


On the receiving end, people didn’t send out nearly as many cranky or angry responses to paper memos because there was a built-in delay between when you received a message and when you could get a reply into the hands of the sender. Mail was only delivered once, maybe twice, a day. Since there was going to be a significant lag time between when you first started composing a letter and when it would finally get delivered, you really had to think about whether your message was still going to be relevant when it got there. You could even count on that delay to consider how you wanted to respond. Since everyone knew that it took some time for written correspondence to make it’s way around, no one expected a response right away. People who worked together did most of their business in person or over the phone if they needed to get something done quickly.


How quaint. How nice!

Don't Panic

I used to start a version of a writing class I taught for managers at my firm by starting with what I thought was a really funny joke. After the title slide of my PowerPoint presentation (I know that my dependence on PowerPoint is one of many bad habits I should kick, but they don’t make patches for this one) I would move on to a slide labeled “Writing for Managers Agenda” and slowly reveal these bulleted points:

• Diagramming sentences
• Examining the differences between analogy and metaphor
• What is the subjunctive tense anyway?

I always had to stop after the third bullet because it just seemed too cruel. I could see the blood draining from the faces of my friends and coworkers as their worst fears about attending a writing class appeared to come true. All I had to do to turn these professionals into squirming junior high kids was threaten them with rules for writing. After this happened the first couple of times I took the joke out of my presentation; I didn’t want to come across as a sadist.

But I eventually put it back in once I realized that there was a reason I had put it there in the first place. And it wasn’t all about having a joke to open with. The truth is that when you tell someone that they are going to attend a writing class the first thing they think is that you are going to ask them to memorize arcane rules and grammatical terms. So I started opening later versions of the class by acknowledging that most people probably weren’t thrilled to be attending a class about writing. By warning them about my “joke” slide in advance, I was able to reassure them that these were not the kinds of writing topics we were primarily concerned with. In retrospect, maybe I should have just begun with a slide displaying the words “Don’t Panic,” which were famously written in large friendly letters on the cover of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and is still the best piece of all-purpose advice I know. Because while the rules of English grammar are important, they certainly aren’t all there is to know about writing well.

Don't Be Bob

Not every badly written or poorly considered email is the kind that is going to get you fired, but they can easily have an impact on the impression you make on your boss, your employees, your coworkers and clients. My interest in the problem of writing effective email developed out of a class I taught at the firm where I work. Concerned that her employees were sending unprofessional emails to clients and inappropriate messages to each other, a friend asked me to put together something along the lines of an “email etiquette” class we could deliver to everyone in her department. She was having particular trouble with one of her supervisors, “Bob,” whose emails to his co-workers were rude and often wound up annoying the attorneys and clients he dealt with. My friend hoped that offering a class to her employees would be useful to all of them, but would have a special impact on Bob.

Having been subjected to bad writing and bad manners in email for years, it was amazingly easy for me to come up with a list of topics that we could address in class: the careless spelling and grammar mistakes; the angry emails ricocheting around the office like bullets; the misdirected messages informing all two thousand people in our nine offices that there were leftover sandwiches in the 45th floor conference room in Los Angeles. Still, it seemed like a good idea to go around and talk to a few other people to see if they had any suggestion that I hadn’t thought of. So I talked to our HR manager, the secretarial supervisor, and a friend in marketing. While they all had good ideas (and some horrifying examples), I was surprised at how many of the things they mentioned were already on my list, and the consistency with which they all mentioned seeing the same problems in email across the firm.

The same thing happened whenever I mention to anyone at work that I was working on an email etiquette class-- I’d get pretty much the same response. “That’s great,” the receptionist said when I talked to her about booking a conference room for the class. “You really need to make the secretaries go to that.” Of course, the secretaries had other ideas. “Too bad you can’t get my attorney to go to training,” one of them said to me. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff he sends people.” The IT department was also at the top of everyone’s list of people who could use training. “No one knows what those people are trying to say,” one attorney complained. “I mean, what the hell is an Exchange Server? Why can’t they just speak English?”

By the time the first class met I had pulled together a lot of material. My plan was to open by talking about the importance of effective communication at work and the ways in which communication had changed since we started to depend so heavily on email. I also had what I hoped were entertaining examples of spelling and grammar mistakes and quick suggestions about how to avoid them. I had the PowerPoint slides that are all but mandatory for any presentation these days. But it turned out that all I really needed was a little exercise that I had planned as an icebreaker. Having divided the class into small groups, I asked them to work together to come up with a list of problems they had seen in other people’s emails: things that annoyed them, things that were rude, things that made their writers look “less than smart,” as I tried to phrase it diplomatically.

We never even got to the second half of my agenda. “Less than smart” me, I should have realized from the beginning how much people love to complain. I couldn’t get them to stop talking. Everyone was having so much fun and they were coming up with such comprehensive lists of things that they hated in email that I decided that it was just best to let their discussion take over most of the class. By the time we went over their lists and everyone explained why the items on them were problems, our time was up. But we had also covered almost all of the items on my agenda, and it felt to me like the most organic teaching experience of my life. I’d never experienced a subject that just seemed to teach itself this way, and I was pleased that everyone seemed to be having such a good time discussing an important topic.

“See, you already know this stuff,” I said to the class, summing things up as I prepared to let them go back to work and their email accounts. “You just need to slow down a little and take some time to think about your messages before you hit the ‘send’ button.” They all nodded in agreement as they finished filling out their evaluation forms for the class (which were all excellent, by the way). I tidied up the room and closed down my laptop as people straggled out the door. Eventually the only person left was Bob, the supervisor whose problematic emails had prompted us to create the class in the first place.

“Hey Corby, I just wanted to thank you and tell you that this class was great,” he said once everyone had left. At that moment I was sure that this was going to be one of those moments trainers live for, one of those times when you just know that you’ve really gotten through to someone who needed your help. “Some of the people who work for me really needed this,” he confided. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff they write.”

This book is for all the Bobs out there. And I’m afraid that we’re all Bobs, convinced that everyone else is committing email atrocities while we’re communicating effectively and charming all of our correspondents with our sparkling wit. I think that I’m generally a pretty good writer, but I know that I’m much more aware of what I’m doing since I’ve spent time thinking about how our writing can derail good communication. So pull up a seat and pay attention. Trust me, you don’t want to be Bob.

It's just email, right?

Why should you care about how you present yourself in email? To put it bluntly, you don’t want to look stupid. While email is undoubtedly a powerful tool that allows the average person to communicate with an unprecedented number of people quickly across huge distances, it also gives us unprecedented power to make asses of ourselves on a global stage. There’s a rule I learned from working on technology projects that says that you can do things fast, you can do them cheap and you can do them well, but you can only achieve two of those three goals on any one project. The idea is that if you try to do things quickly and on the cheap you’re bound to have a bad result. And a similar rule applies to email communication. Email is certainly fast and cheap (which is why it’s so popular with spammers), but you also have to make the effort to do it well if you’re going to avoid getting yourself in trouble. Most of us take the speed and ease of email communication for granted without considering all the things that can go wrong when we don’t bother to communicate clearly or to consider the life-changing results that can happen when we get caught up in the dizzying speed of electronic communications. I’m not just talking about what happens when you send your boss a message full of typos or when you mean to forward along a message to a friend with a snotty comment and accidentally hit the “reply to all” button by mistake. The incredible, thrilling power of email can easily extend to getting you fired or changing the path of your entire career.

Since I’ve spent most of my professional career working at various incarnations of a law firm which, Borg-like, continues to absorb other firms as it grows and occasionally changes it’s name, the examples of career suicide by email that I know best come from the legal world. I’m sure every industry has its favorites. Mine is the farewell email from an associate at the big firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker. I get the garden variety of these emails every week-- you probably do too. Someone is leaving the company and they drop a note to everyone in the office letting them know where they can be reached in the future and thanking all the people who made the firm such a wonderful place to work. (Which always makes me wonder-- if it’s such a great place, why are you leaving?)

The email from the Paul Hastings associate left no such doubt in anyone’s mind. His email declared that he was leaving to become a “trophy husband,” which he explained would be “a step up from my current situation” at the firm. And while he did manage to thank some of the people he had worked with, he also complained that "I am no longer comfortable working for a group largely populated by gossips, backstabbers and Napoleonic personalities," and that he would rather be “dressed up like a piñata and beaten than remain with this group any longer." Apparently not satisfied that he’d thoroughly finished off his future practicing law at a large firm, he wished Paul Hastings "continued success in your goals to turn vibrant, productive, dedicated associates into an aimless, shambling group of dry, lifeless husks."

Honestly, it’s the kind of email that we’ve all wanted to send at one time in our lives or another. In a way I kind of admire the guy for actually following through on that fantasy we all have every now and then of living out that “take this job and shove it” moment. Other people must also have taken pleasure in his moment of uninhibited criticism, because the email escaped the confines of Paul, Hastings and spread in the wild with remarkable speed. Within 24 hours everyone I talked to in the legal industry had received at least one copy of the email. I had five of them forwarded to me, even though this was before I was teaching “email etiquette” classes. And while I have to respect the associate’s chutzpah, I have to cringe when I think what this incident may have done to his career. I hope that trophy husband thing worked out well for him, because even though the whole incident happened a couple of years ago, that email is still floating around out there. It’s still lurking in people’s inboxes waiting to get forwarded and stories about the episode can still be found in the archives of the legal news websites. I’m not going to print the poor guy’s name, but it’s easy enough to find if you do a little searching on the web.

Chances are he probably never meant to send the message in the first place; apparently he made a futile attempt to recall it once it had gone out. But if he didn’t mean to send the message he never should have written the email in the first place, and he certainly shouldn’t have addressed it. I’ll admit I’ve written some hotheaded things myself, but I always make sure that the address fields are empty so I don’t run the risk of accidentally hitting the “send” button and making a fool of myself. And if he really did address it and send it on purpose, he made a big mistake in not realizing that his potential audience was much larger than the list of names in his “To:” and “Cc:” fields. Every one of the co-workers he sent the message to (including those he insulted) was free to forward the message along to anyone in their address books. From the speed with which the email made the rounds of the legal industry, I’d guess that just about every one of them did.

Another favorite cautionary tale? How about the spat between two legal secretaries working at the firm of Allens Arthur Robinson in Sydney, Australia, which started with email accusations that someone had stolen the makings of a ham sandwich, progressed to a public exchange over which of them made more money, why one couldn’t keep a boyfriend, and whether blondes really are dumb, and wound up with both of them getting fired for misusing the firm’s email system. Sounds like a urban legend? Well it’s not. I’ve seen pictures of both ladies in Australian newspapers. According to the urban legend debunking site Snopes.com, this one is true. As Snopes recounts:

The pair's e-mail spat was forwarded to colleagues at Allens, who copied it to rival firms, including Mallesons, Phillips Fox and Gadens. Soon it was sweeping the city's legal and financial offices, drawing comments from employee of Westpac, Deloitte, Macquarie Bank and JP Morgan. The two secretaries who had descended into slinging words at one another were fired by the firm, and an Allens Arthur Robinson spokesman said anyone involved in forwarding the e-mail along to others would be disciplined. "E-mail is a business tool, not a personal messaging system. The use of it in this case was not in any way acceptable, nor is that the way we expect people totreat their work colleagues," he said. "We have taken appropriate disciplinary action against anyone who dealt with the e-mails inappropriately."

http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/email/ham.asp

Like the associate’s bridge-burning email, the argument between the two secretaries didn’t stop with them; the email spread throughout law firms in Australia and eventually made its way around the world as one of those “they can’t make up this kind of stuff” news blurbs. The fallout from the incident didn’t stop with them either. While they were both fired, other employees of Allens Arthur Robinson were also disciplined for forwarding the message along to their co-workers as well as to people outside the firm. You don’t even have to write a nasty email to get in trouble-- all you need to do is forward one.

Though these might seem like extreme examples, they are really only exceptional in that they were seen by so many people and briefly made their way into the media. Trust me, people lose their jobs over email every day-- I’ve even known a few. And it could happen to you. For more stories and more suggestions on how you can avoid committing the kinds of mistakes that can make you look stupid or even get your fired, keep reading.