Efficiency w words.

I know, I haven't been blogging lately and I suck for it. I apologize to my ten faithful readers :) I'm really hoping to overcome this lazy streak soon. I've noticed this strange tendency in myself lately: I'm having a harder and harder time writing anything lengthy. Emails are the best example. If I find I'm writing a long email, I start to doubt whether it needs to be that long, and I usually delete the whole thing and start over, planning a pared-down precis.

Why do I do this? It's not because I've lost my sense of the value (virtue, even!) of verbosity. I think my family would challenge you were you to make that contention :) I've thought about it, and I think this is the culprit: partners and senior associates don't read half of what I write, if that. So if my email is long, chances are it won't be read. And if it isn't read, and it said something important, then of course *I* end up being the one to blame if something goes wrong because of it. And I don't like people blaming me.

This one partner that I work for is particularly bad about this. Just the other day I forwarded him a paragraph another associate suggested we insert into a document and wrote a quick message along the lines of "should I include this?" Partner had, shortly before this, written me an email telling me other (additional) things to incorporate into the document, and I'd followed his instructions accordingly. Unfortunately for me, the email from partner and the email I forwarded to him had very similar titles. So he thought I was asking him if he wanted me to insert the stuff he had just sent me, and he responded with a testy email along the lines of "why do you think I said to put it in?" (I cleared it up, but getting malignant missives from partners is never, ever fun).

Sigh. This sort of thing SO isn't my fault. Nonetheless, I bear the brunt of the badness following a loquacious letter. So less typing it is.

You'd think this would leave me wanting to just spill tons of words onto my very own blog page. Strangely, no. Blech, self-editing.

At least linguistically-minded readers like JCA will no doubt appreciate my assorted amateur attempts at alliteration, with which I've lightly peppered this post :)