Category Archives: Writing

How to write shorter, better e-mails

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Each time I complete writing a lengthy e-mail, I save it in my drafts and let it sit there for a while (sometimes, just a minute or two would do). Then, returning to it, I look at it through the eyes of my recipient, and imagine how I’d read it if I had only ten seconds to do so, and had plenty of other work commitments on my mind.

Almost always, I’d find that e-mail unclear, unpersuasive, and unreasonably long, leading to a rewrite that’s clearer, more persuasive, and shorter by 50% to boot.

This change of perspective, though simple, can provide you with a dramatically better e-mail.

On the need to write, to write.

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Words excite me. Really, they do.

The prospect of writing something good tantalises me like the prospect of having good sex. My pupils enlarge; my breathing gets shallower; my hands get all balmy.

But as much as I love to write, I haven’t been writing lately. Probably because I’ve been finding that there’s hardly anything to write about. I’m a strong believer in the saying “if you’ve got nothing to say, don’t.” And if you’re got nothing to write about…

The thing is, not writing tends to become quite a bit of a habit. The less you write, the less you’ll feel like writing; and the more you write, the more you’ll feel like writing.

It’s a little bit of a catch-22: though I want to avoid bad writing as much as possible (and having nothing to write almost definitely leads to bad writing if it is forced), it has been said that bad writing inevitably precedes good writing.

I suppose that’s the reason why I wrote my last post about the Bon Iver music video and my wanting to go Iceland one day, even though It wasn’t something I particularly felt I had to write or share about.

I just knew I had to write something. And whatdya know, one thing led to another, and here I am again.

Happiness Doesn’t Lead to New Writing

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I’ve always felt that my best pieces of writing were written in times of melancholy, sadness, or anger — generally negative feelings you’d want to avoid.

During the better times, those good but not great times, writing doesn’t come quite as readily. Perhaps it’s because life keeps you satiated with itself, and writing just isn’t needed. For most casual writers, is this not the case?

Bing Donn Lee’s Star

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You ask yourself if having a domain name, specifically edonn.com, actually creates more stress than necessary. Didn’t you just go to bing.com to do a search on “donn lee” realise that it didn’t contain any results linking to your webpage? And didn’t this little thing cause you to start feeling a little flustered, a little stressed, and a little lost? Didn’t you immediately wonder if you should have been promoting your website more to get it higher up the search rankings?

How difficult can it be, you figure, since there is but one more prominent Donn Lee online, that of a Facebook engineer who has been online longer than you have (probably since when the world wide web was born; probably since when you was born). Though his website(s) aren’t very interesting (to you), and they don’t look particularly aesthetically pleasing, his experience affords him the luxury of first place if not for now, then for a long time to come.

Early in this war of “donn” search rankings, you decided that he wasn’t going to be someone you were working to topple (though it had entered your mind more than once), but was instead just going to “be there” hogging the top spot while you lingered in second place; and it wasn’t something you felt or were going to feel bad about because it was exactly what you expected and was, in all honesty, what you were working for.

At the end of that state of fluster upon finding out you were not featuring at all on bing.com’s “donn lee” searches, you suddenly experienced a precious feeling of freedom from no longer being the top dog (or second, or third… were you even a “good” dog?) This disappearing into obscurity seemes to have brought its own kind of reward. The pressure to perform – to write, to publish – had disappeared along with your search rankings, even if this pressure was self-manifested, and even (especially!) when this pressure to “perform” was for a “performance” that really wasn’t anything close to great (…or good; or above-average; or mediocre… deperessing).

It is, you think, perhaps time to give up this domain. Not so much in the physical sense (you love @edonn.com too much to give it up), but what it stands for: “I have my own blog on my own domain, and thefore I am (a writer)”. It is perhaps time to give it up, because according to bing.com, there’s just not so much fantasy to live up to anymore. Your star has faded.

Being Close to Greatness

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A couple of days back I read a newspaper article in the Straits Times describing the way Liverpool beat Real Madrid 4-0 in the UEFA Champions League. Besides the hugely unexpected scoreline, another thing about that article had caught my eye: the clever way the writer praised the performance of one player while lambasting the performance of another:

Raul Gonzalez barely had a kick. The nearest he got to greatness was shen he shook [Steven] Gerrard’s hand.

Unfortunately the article was not attributed to an author, but I think he (or she), too, deserved praise for this wonderful use of language — it is what I believe a great instance of dry humour.