Art of Email

Emailing has become an art just as the old letter writing once was. There are nuances to the matter of pecking away at a keyboard and sending off a few lines, or more, of text. In the days of yore, one was identified by what was seen on the envelope according to the penmanship style thereon. I was a prolific letter writer in-the-day and while I tried desperately to do something about my almost unreadable handwriting, it just wouldn't settle into any one legible pattern. As my scrawl went from page one to two and sometimes onward, its forms became more and more unreadable. The trouble was my thinking which tends to accelerate as I run along the paths of its global style and it often shoots off into multiple directions that become lost in the scramble of ideas. When I hand-wrote other pieces for articles or editor submissions, I could barely read them myself. Needless to say, I learned how to type, but being a self-taught endeavor as it was, I never did attain the speed of a steno or the acuity of a true journalist. Even today, flying around a keyboard which is something I do habitually, I make myriads of mistakes and spend a good deal of time backspacing in correcting to where I have almost worn out that key along with the "t", "i" and "r" and"e". ( Perhaps there is an acronym here.) I am sure some of you know how that goes. Then along came emails, and I fell in love with the whole concept. But, I wrote the way I did when I wrote letters. I am verbose but the ears and eyes of my beholders don't always match my love of length over strength in expression. I was told politely and otherwise, that my emails were cumbersome or to put it gently a "bloody waste of time". I had to do some fierce editing or lose friends. I began by using maddening short forms of words and mere letters to depict whole ones. I employed the dash rather than punctuation. I even tried the criminal keyboard act of using capital letters only. My reformed style was so personally embarrassing that I had to quit and reverted to doing my usual long-winded approach but editing it afterward and cutting out any extraneous words or, indeed, sentences and it worked rather well in the beginning. I have currently eliminated the editing and do it now, as I go along. They are still messages more lengthy than most persons' but both I, the sender and thou, the receiver, are much happier with the result. I think. I am still bothered when I get emails that have rampant usage mistakes that no one had bothered to correct. Incorrect spelling especially gets to me as do things like capitalizing words in the middle of sentences for no reason whatsoever. I see on-line that there is free help with this if one is able to find the very lightly underlined marked errors they do. And there is Spellcheck. Since I may have gone on far too long already, I end.