To whomsoever it doesn't concern: are standard letters the best way to convey a message?
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Version 0 of 1. Dear all, Thank you for taking the time to read this. I realise you must be very busy. Unless you're not. But even then, you may have the self-image of being very busy, in which case you probably begrudge the time that reading this will take even more than the genuinely busy. So I thank you the most. In either case, feel free to skip this section which is basically just pleasantries and acknowledgment of busyness and move on to the main bit of the letter. Of course, without reading this bit you wouldn't know that you could skip it, since the information about its skipability is contained within it. I have no idea how to overcome that paradox and can only apologise and thank you again for your time. The reason I am writing to you all is to express my concern about circular letters and emails. I have begun to suspect that they are ineffective, and even counter-productive – that the juxtaposition of a form of communication that people associate with personal messages, with the untargeted information and long-winded, repetitive, reiterative, periphrastic verbosity that such missives contain, irritates many recipients. They kick against them, saying to themselves, "This does not apply to me!" even when it does. If you are such a person, I am at a loss to predict how you will be reacting to this communication. Will you reject it as usual, suddenly claiming you've found other impersonal correspondence uncannily pertinent? Or will you accept that this particular undirected assault on your finite mortal span is an exception? To remain consistent you must make yourself a hypocrite – and vice versa. Again I can only apologise in the hope that it'll prevent your eyes from carelessly skimming forward, trying to gauge how much there is to go before you get your life back, and thereby missing important information. And I must remind you that the underlined bits are not necessarily the most relevant. Some sections are randomly underlined because of an unavoidable clerical error. So, let us all take a deep breath before attempting the next tortuous paragraph. You may be wondering what provoked this circuitous condemnation of the circular. (You may not, of course. You may be wondering about something entirely different. You may be incapable of wonder. You may have stopped reading.) Last week two news stories exposed circulars' limitations in different ways. The first was the report that Lucy Adams, former BBC head of human resources, had reflected regretfully about the emails she regularly dispatched to 20,000 corporation inboxes while the various scandals about Jimmy Savile and executive severance pay were raging. She told an employment conference in London that she'd come to realise they "were crap", "pompous and sterile, lacking any humanity or humility. I had adopted the royal executive 'we' and… 'lawyered out' any personality." I'm sure she's right, but I don't think the emails' contents were the main thing that was wrong with them. The primary problem was that they existed at all. Never mind the lack of humility in what they say, merely sending that sort of message shows colossal arrogance. It may not have been her personal arrogance, but the arrogance of her office, the presumption that a large organisation imparts to its senior staff that it's their job to pontificate. One can imagine the groans as yet another essay packed with corporate-speak and denial of responsibility dropped into everyone's computers, like a royal decree from a particularly nerdy king. Except it's not like a royal decree – it's worse. A decree is like a law or a notice or a sign – it's an appropriate medium for telling everyone something. In contrast, these emails are like receiving a letter from the prime minister every year that reads: "Dear member of the public, may I respectfully remind you not to steal anything or do a murder…"; they're like getting a text whenever you board a train reminding you that you mustn't smoke; they're like someone standing up in a crowded restaurant, clinking a spoon on the side of a wine glass for hush, and then making a speech about what to do in the event of a fire. The second newsworthy circular was significantly better received. It was a covering letter that Rachel Tomlinson, head teacher of Barrowford primary school in Lancashire, sent to pupils with their key stage 2 results. It basically said that exams aren't the be-all and end-all of existence and that these results consequently didn't reflect all of the students' strengths: "They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day. They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play or participate in sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister after school." It ended with the observation that "there are many ways of being smart". Very true. And there are even more ways of being smart casual. It's a minefield. Most people thought this was great, even when it turned out that Tomlinson had cut and pasted it from an American blog. A few carpers moaned that it undermined the importance of academic achievement by going on about other irrelevant, if admirable, qualities; it was like citing the ability to swim in mitigation of failing a driving test. But it seemed a kindly letter to me. (I was more annoyed that the photographs of these letters in the press show that the school has both a logo – a "B" drawn a bit like a heart – and a tagline, "Learn to Love. Love to Learn", which I found somewhat emetic.) However, I can think of few less effective ways of making people sincerely feel valued than a set of standard compliments supposedly proclaiming their uniqueness. When it then transpired that this praise was written thousands of miles away and directed at a different group of, coincidentally, also unique children, it put the icing on the cake of the letter's pointlessness. It's no more likely to make anyone feel good about themselves than a rusty sign saying: "You look nice". So I'm writing to you today to explain that standard letters don't work. They're an even more annoying way of delivering unwanted verbiage to large numbers of strangers than a newspaper column. Thank you for your attention. Please do not reply to this email. Best impersonal regards, D Mitchell |