Don’t Send That Email

August 31, 2009 by Jerry

email_skimming

John Freeman, the author of a forthcoming book called, The Tyranny of E-mail, wrote a preview of the book as an essay in the Wall Street Journal in which he said:

Brain science may suggest that some decisions can be made in the blink of an eye, but not all
judgments benefit from a short frame of reference. We need to protect the finite well of our
attention if we care about our relationships. We need time in order to properly consider the
effect of what we say upon others. We need time in order to grasp the political and professional
ramifications of our typed correspondence. We need time to shape and design and filter our
words so that we say exactly what we mean. Communicating at great haste hones our utterances
down to instincts and impulses that until now have been held back or channeled more carefully.

Mr. Freeman’s very valid point of view addresses one of the most basic precepts of education, spaced learning, or learning distributed over time. Spaced learning is the opposite of massed learning, and a synonym for massed learning is cramming.

We are all familiar with cramming—going back to our all-nighters in school dormitories and forward to the business presentations we cobble together by begging, borrowing, and stealing our colleagues’ slides just before we rush out the door to an important presentation. And we are all familiar with the results of cramming—cursory (if any) knowledge of the crammed material and zero retention moments after the moment of truth.

The obvious solution is to spend ample time—spaced out over time—to prepare and practice your presentation; to evolve it in multiple drafts. This iterative process is a de facto byproduct of our stratified and dispersed corporate culture, but spaced learning is also important in a more individual effort, writing—and that includes every form of writing from books to emails.

One of my first lessons as a writer happened many, many years ago with my first book, a paperback novel called The Zodiac Killer (a fictional version of the actual murder case that became a film in 2007). Never having written a novel, I was reliant on my editor for guidance. One of the first and most valuable pieces of advice she gave me was to put aside any section I had written—be it a paragraph, a page, or a chapter—and return to it after an interval of anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Inevitably, whenever I did, I would find words, phrases, sentences, expressions that needed rewriting. The rewriting would always be an improvement over the prior draft. I wrote many, many drafts—as any writer would—and each draft was an improvement over the preceding draft. That is the essence and benefit of spaced learning.

In Wednesday’s post, you’ll read how spaced learning applies to a shorter form of writing, and the subject of Mr. Freeman’s book, email.

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