On writing, language, and email standards...

Language is an important thing to me.

I have a few language problems in my writing style, and I feel they reflect flaws in my thinking style.

Specifically, I tend to interlude heavily in standard writing. I tend to insert references, or jump to asides. I tend to use commasplices, even where correctly done, in sentences that don't need them. For example, a "correctly done" commasplice is where the segment between two commas can be removed and the sentence will still make sense, such as 'even where correctly done' in the previous sentence.

I think more quickly than I can write, and I struggle to get my ideas down on paper.

I tend in email communication to make messages far longer than most people's "tl;dr" filter (too long; didn't read).

I've done a few things to combat this, especially at work:

1) At my manager's insistence, I've turned on the pine option "do not send flowed text", which means basically that my email goes out hard-wrapped wherever the composer wraps it. Apparently I am the only person whose email goes all the way across the screen, otherwise. Now, in my brain, that would mean "your window is the wrong size, then", but he's the boss. And pointing out that my mailer, in doing so, was complying with RFC 3676 didn't seem to help. The net result of this is LESS of one of my emails fits on a screen, which makes the next steps more of a challenge.

2) I started using my screen length, which varies depending what system I'm on, as the delimiter for if a message is too long. If it goes beyond screen-length, I seriously consider scrapping it and start over. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but I've discovered some things about people:

• People are more likely to read something through if they see your signature as soon as they start reading.

• People aren't in the same frame of mind I am, not thinking the same thoughts along the same lines: if I've forced them to scroll down, this means what I've previously said is off-their-screen, and will be when replying as well.

• People only tend to grasp one concept per email. If I sent a 10-screen email about various projects I want to do, breaking them all down, it's less likely to get read than if I had sent ten emails, and cautiously timed them throughout the day.

• The length of your message is inversely proportional to the number of completely-relevant responses you will get (i.e. responses which address all points you have made). I think I can prove this by the number of responses I will get to this entry, versus me making a post where I simply say something short and meme-like, like "Gushi can't enjoy his sandwich". Now, in the corporate world, it's more important. I write messages because I need people to understand why I'm about to do something, why I need to take a server offline, why I need to spend money.

• The last rule above is less true on my blog. I love knowing people read it, and I love feedback, but I fully expect that the people who will understand everything I write is a subset of the total readership: i.e. on the blog it's more about "get your thoughts out" and less about "make people want to read your message".

3) I worked quite hard, at least in corporate mail, to reduce or eliminate a few overused standards I love:

• Ellipses I love these things, but I'm trying to mentally...train myself...to hear william shatner...when I read them. I tend to use ellipses when I'm unsure of a concept, or when a concept is...not quite right...almost like another problem.

• Parenthetical asides and other things like footnotes. They basically are the universal symbol for getting off topic for a short while. (All of family guy's humor is based on this concept. See?)

• The em-dash I don't abuse this as much as I used to. I tend to use it more abusively in fiction -- where I'm trying to describe the stream of consciousness inside a character's head. I guess this means I tend to think in em-dashes. It makes sense.

• Emoticons and humor. I'm a geek in a company full of geeks. I tend to be laid back, but I need to try and communicate more seriously. I suppose a part of me feels this is necessary as I'm in a new-ish situation at a new job, and I perceive a lot of people as a bit uptight, and don't know them well. I guess in a widely-geographically-distributed company I'm trying to impart the same level of relaxation and gregariousness I'd show in person, but the analog is less than perfect, and I feel it might make me seem less than professional.

Like the "length" rule above, I tend to think the last one is less true on my blog as well. An emoticon can mean the difference between lawsuit-angry and bofh-angry. But being more aware of it in general is not a bad thing.

I find becoming conscious of the above helps me be aware of it. I'm not trying to stop using them entirely, just to realize that if I'm using them, I'm losing the message. I mean, they have their place -- all punctuation does. (Doesn't it? I'm not sure...) Sorry, unavoidable.

4) Syntax checking. As I tend to write in a technical sense, and in a harried fashion, I notice a lot of times where I'll do something like:

We need to check for this syntax (like we did on that other thing, which is important all the time (except in case X)

See above? It's the desired format. It gets the information across, and yes the parentheses are necessary. But just like in programming, it fails to parse because there's no secondary closing brackets. I tend to miss this and endquotes all the time. It annoys me. And there's no good open-source "readability checker" I can filter my mail outbound through.

Ironically, most text editors let me do this for writing code, let me find mismatched or misbalanced brackets, it's just not built into my email client. And above, where should the closing paren be? After the word 'thing', or should it be a double-paren after 'X)'? Only I know, so sending mail out without it is sloppy. And it bothers me quite a lot.

I'm a technical writer, and I try to treat my audience as techical. While I may talk about nontechnical manners like emotions in this journal, I maintain a technical tone. And lets face it, the emotions and nuances of the human brain are infinitely more complex than simple things like computers.

Writing technical is a lot like writing lawyerese. Very often you have to detail several examples of things, and more often than not, some of those examples will have things in common that others do not. The semantic differences between words like "MAY" and "SHOULD" and "MUST" are critical in the world I live in. It involves detailing problems most people don't see, and predicting standards that will be used long after you're gone.

Writing is also an arduous process for me. It tends to be a brainstorming long-write process, then getting out ideas and de-duplicate things. I'll often mention the same idea two or three times, then edit and refine them down, moving whole paragraphs and sentences around. As a quick example, the list above was not written in order at all; #2 was written last.

It means cutting concepts that I think are notable to say but ultimately un-relevant. Above, when talking about there being no unix-based readability checker, I wanted to talk about how I'd see the ideal use of such a thing to be in a spam filter. But it dilutes the topic, and that's bad. For that one, I can mention it here. But on others, dropping those ideas hurts, since I may not know if or when I'll remember to write up a whole separate entry about how cool that would be, and a lot of ideas have merit. Especially when talking about improving an existing system: often you lose scope and want to change the system to make it better, rather than working a single problem. This is hard for a lot of people.

It's definitely not helped by the fact that my work and my life are interrupt driven. In mid-paragraph I might need to get up to handle a "fire", and come back 45 minutes later, and experience a need to reorient myself, which I often don't do as well as I should. Caffiene also makes it worse for me, it makes me more focused on making a post/letter LONGER and more-tangented. My boss is rather famous for saying "I'll explain it because I've had too much coffee".

I'm working on it, slowly. It's not easy. I'm hoping the techniques I've detailed here give insight to anyone else who reads into what goes on in my head, and into what it takes for me to do this. I had someone today say that I was very worth reading, which is awesome. (Thanks jacel).
I've been told by several people I should write a tech-blog, but what's the point there? This is me. This is who I am. I am a human who is technical. I suppose the logic of splitting my blogs if I decide to is best saved for another post as well.

Now, if you'd like to talk about tangents: this started off as a post in my other blog, where I share intimate things about my relationship-life. Within two paragraphs, I was off the original topic and talking about writing standards. Since it's a reasonably good chance that everyone who reads that blog reads this one, I'll probably consider this read-first type material.