I suppose I could have truncated it even further to “We’re fucked” but then I’d have to provide details anyway.
I’m in the US and have colleagues in England, France, and Germany so I have to be careful how I put things which means I had to take out the editorializing and colloquialisms. Then I decided maybe one of our vendors doesn’t really need to hear this (yet) so I took him out of the distribution (adjusted message accordingly). Then I saw I was using too many parenthetical remarks, so some of those had to come out (after which I adjusted accordingly). Oops! I did it again.
We’re at the tail end of a global research project and someone somewhere missed something (no one came to harm) and now fixing it is going to get in the way of doing all the other stuff we need to do to finish this thing off.
in science and technical writing it’s common to use parenthesis (there are always details [sometimes multiple levels of details {which i separate using different symbols so that people don’t have to count parenthesis (like in computer code)}]).
I’ve (too many times) spent a full day agonizing over a business email (is the tone right? Too formal? Too casual? Do I sound cold or professional? Sweet Jesus, what is the correct salutation? And how do I sign it - “‘Thanks,’ ‘Regards,’ ‘Cheers’, or just a simple ‘-GameHat’”? Sent one today that I had been putting off for nearly a week. Here’s what the actual content was:
*
Dear Guy:
We’re meeting for our product trial at 6AM Thursday, right? Dick, Jane and I plan to show up then.
You have all the stuff you need, correct?
Thanks for working with us.
-GameHat
*
The actual email I finally sent wasn’t long, wordy, or over-flattering. But damned if I didn’t think about how to craft it for a full week. This is a potential customer we really want, plus they are pretty smart people with a bunch of (genuinely smart and useful) PhDs. So yeah, I wrote and re-wrote this minor email several times, putting off the ‘send’ button until I absolutely couldn’t wait any longer to send it.
Sometimes I use parentheses, sometimes I use commas, sometimes I use semi-colons, sometimes I use asterisked footnotes, and on Twitter I use hashtags. The way I use them is entirely interchangeable. I should just pick one and stick to it.
Several famous writers have commented that shortening a letter takes time!
[QUOTE=Martin Luther King, Jr.]
Never before have I written so long a letter… I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk …
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Karl Gauss]
I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Blaise Pascal]
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Mark Twain]
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
[/QUOTE]
