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by filleokus 2133 days ago
I don't know if it's just me, but I very much prefer easy to skim emails to more dense ones.

At one point I got weekly project updates from a team I was working with, and one guy wrote dense, short, emails where I would have to read every sentence carefully to get a hang on what was going on. Another guy would write longer, fluffier emails but with bullet points and paragraphs in the same order:

> Hi everyone!

> {fluff}

> {general status}

>

> - Bullet points of things done that week

> {comment about things done}

>

> - Bullet points of things to do next week

> {comment about potential problems etc}

>

> {fluff}

> {annoyingly long footer}

Just by parsing the number of bulletpoints, and the length of each bullet point (and the first word) I would get a surprisingly good grasp on how things were going, and what was hard/complicated (longer bullet point -> more complex), and very easy to read about exactly I wanted to know.

4 comments

This is how the so called sutras are written: a page of text gets compressed into one short sentence, so you have to stop after each of them and spend an hour unpacking its meaning, but the entire book is often just 200 sentences.
Sutras like Panini's Grammer written 5th century BC are great product of formal knowledge from India. However, writing emails is not the same thing:

- Sutras solved the problem to retaining large chunks of knowledge.

- Sutras had formal rules to keep the meaning unambiguous.

- Sutras were written by the sages who had lot of knowledge and control over language.

-Sutras were written in Sanskrit. A highly malleable (due to SANDHI and SAMAS) yet a precise language.

- English is not the right language to write tersely.

.zip format in history.
You have to adapt while writing: If I want a "more important" sentence to be read, I put on it's own paragraph.
I'm the same and agree with you, but at the same time I've encountered issues with staff who disagree and who feel slighted or depersonalized by less "fluffy" prose. I think you really have to know your audience and Postel's Law applies to an extent.
This short email style is done to encourage conversations with users to find better market fit.

With colleagues I guess a style that helps to cut down on questions like the one you described is inferior.