Email Blindness

By M.J. Moores on August 26, 2014 • ( 2 )

Writerly Rant #48

by M.J. Moores, OCT. Author. Editor. Freelance Writer.

Have you ever noticed that some of your friends, colleagues, or even clients don’t read the entire email you send them? This has been happening more and more frequently with me – and if you can believe it, the clients are some of the worst perpetrators of email blindness.

It’s incredible sometimes.

If I need information to help clarify a situation and give a list of requests, only the first one or maybe two items are actually responded to. Then I’m unable to go any further than I was before on the project because I still need the other one or three items answered. Honestly, am I expected to send a separate message for each item I need? If I did, I guarantee they’d skip to the last email in the series and only respond to that one.

It’s like the modern mind has no capacity to go the distance these days when it comes to social media – tweets are 140 characters long, facebook posts longer than 140 words are ignored by most, and messaging in general happens in fits and spurts. How is anyone supposed to read a 300 page novel if they can’t even focus on 300 words?

And it’s not the younger generation that’s blinded – it’s people my own age or older. It’s like their patience and attention span has given up on them. How difficult is it to read an entire email message and respond to every item addressed? Yes. It’s time consuming but if it’s related to any kind of important information you’d think an alert would go off and a mental alarm would sound to let them know – but perhaps people have become def to words as well?

For goodness sake – if someone takes the time to message you, and it’s not spam, at least be considerate and read the entire thing. Imagine someone cutting your phone message short just as you’re trying to speak the most critical part of the situation to the answering machine. It’s the same thing – only in that instance it’s a nuisance for both the sender and the receiver.

I’m not trying to teach the blind to paint or the def to sing here – it would just be nice if braille and sign language had applications for email users.

‘Nuf said.