Inbox insight

Be free with your email:

“What we really need is an email tra­di­tion com­par­able with the tra­di­tion of letters.”

I can pre­cisely date the day on which I dis­covered email for the very first time. It was Monday, Janu­ary 5, 1998 — and it was my first day at the BBC.

I was a com­plete new­comer to email and the web — no com­puter at home, you see, and all the ter­rible jobs I’d drif­ted in and out of since gradu­at­ing four years pre­vi­ously had required noth­ing more tech­no­lo­gic­ally advanced than word-processing — so I spent my first week in my new job nego­ti­at­ing a steep learn­ing curve, whilst bluff­ing to my work col­leagues that all this inform­a­tion super­high­way malar­key (or whatever they called it in those dim and dis­tant days) was in fact second nature to me. By the end of my first work­ing week I still had to fully get to grips with the net, but email had already proved to be a rev­el­a­tion (as long-lost friends who received excited mes­sages say­ing little more than “Look! It’s me! I’ve got an email address!” could testify).

The reas­ons I love email are pretty much the same today as they were then, just over six years ago. I love com­mu­nic­a­tion and con­ver­sa­tion, par­tic­u­larly of the instant vari­ety, but I don’t find it easy to talk to people. As I’ve said many times before, speak­ing doesn’t come nat­ur­ally to me but writ­ing does. Before email took over, I was a keen writer of long, ram­bling let­ters, and with some of my closest cor­res­pond­ents these let­ters would turn into com­plex and char­ac­ter­ful con­ver­sa­tions — yet there was always that frus­trat­ing delay of writ­ing, post­ing, receiv­ing, await­ing a reply. Sud­denly, with email, I could have those con­ver­sa­tions almost in real time.

Between letter-writing fall­ing by the way­side and this web­site arriv­ing online in Octo­ber 2000, email was the means through which I indulged my love of writ­ing. Thanks to a com­bin­a­tion of jobs where there were often quiet peri­ods, and close new friend­ships with people who loved chat­ting away via Out­look as much as I did, I became unhealth­ily addicted. Dull autum­nal after­noons stuck in the middle of an open-plan office would race by as I found myself immersed in two or three email con­ver­sa­tions, all hap­pen­ing at the same time. Most of the chat­ter was inane and frivol­ous, but a num­ber of the more exten­ded dia­logues touched on ser­i­ous, heart­felt top­ics and could be quite reveal­ing (not least about me). And while some of the emails were fly­ing back and forth across the world, oth­ers were trav­el­ling a few hun­dred yards down the road or even just to the next desk.

I quickly noticed some­thing else about this new out­let for com­mu­nic­a­tion, some­thing that all of us who have grown accus­tomed to email have dis­covered. It changed the way I wrote. I rarely found myself slip­ping into the kind of email slang that teach­ers wor­ry­ing for the future of pupils’ lan­guage skills com­plain about, but I did find myself adding the pauses and exag­ger­a­tions — even the char­ac­ter­istic nervous tics — that fea­ture in my speech. It par­tic­u­larly mani­fes­ted itself through ridicu­lous amounts of unne­ces­sary punc­tu­ation and the use of those ‘thought pauses’ that are sprinkled through­out any con­ver­sa­tion. Er, um, ah, oh and other two-letter hesitations.

“… research­ers at Edin­burgh Uni­ver­sity, ana­lys­ing the lan­guage of emails, are turn­ing up tell-tale signs reveal­ing how neur­otic or extro­vert their writers are. Neur­ot­ics, it was repor­ted, are more likely to indulge in mul­tiple use of exclam­a­tion marks or use ‘…’ in their emails. They are also that much more likely to start sen­tences with the word ‘well’ and to spray their com­mas and adverbs around more erratically.”

So, accord­ing to the same art­icle, my emails reveal that I’m neur­otic too. Some­how, this is not news to me. I’m just as neur­otic in writ­ten con­ver­sa­tions as I am in face-to-face ones.

“And yet as I set about pur­ging some 3,000 emails that have accu­mu­lated on my machine since I star­ted get­ting and send­ing them, I’m struck by the num­ber I choose to save.”

Oh yes, I recog­nise this fail­ing all too well. I still have many of those lengthy hand­writ­ten replies that I used to receive in response to my equally lengthy let­ters. They’re in an old red card­board folder labelled, rather ima­gin­at­ively, ‘Let­ters’. How­ever, the emails that I hoard in their hun­dreds (and occa­sion­ally in their thou­sands) are jeal­ously guarded in sub-folders under indi­vidu­als’ names. I rarely, if ever, go back and read through these old back and forth and back again chats, but it’s very com­fort­ing to know that they’re there should I wish to do so. I keep con­ver­sa­tions for pos­ter­ity. Last year, when my PC exploded (and it did, quite lit­er­ally, explode), by far the worst moment occurred when I real­ised that I had lost a huge chunk of all those care­fully archived mes­sages going back years and years, which I had dili­gently stored in a zipped file on my hard disk. I lost some files relat­ing to my job too, but that caused me far less upset. Go figure.

I’ve often said on these pages that writ­ing is as nat­ural to me as speak­ing. Well, I lied. Sort of. Writ­ing in emails is as nat­ural to me as speak­ing, whilst writ­ing on this site — with the pos­sible excep­tion of this par­tic­u­lar ram­bling entry that has appeared to lose any sense of a cohes­ive struc­ture — is planned in far greater detail. These pages con­tain my genu­ine voice, but with improve­ments; I always give my words a thor­ough qual­ity check and a final spit and pol­ish before I present them to the world.

To be hon­est, you really wouldn’t want it any other way — not unless you hap­pen to enjoy posts that are filled with over-enthusiastic punc­tu­ation and excess­ive smileys!!! ;-)