• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, May 2, 2024

Like most people in this business, I get at least 100 emails a day, and sometimes twice that number. I can barely scroll through them all.  

Worse, some are seriously annoying — especially from B2B senders. For instance, those that start by telling me “Hope you’re well" or “Hope you had a good weekend.” 

Huh? I don’t even know this person (or the firm behind the mass email), and they’re inquiring about my health or wishing me a good weekend (in hindsight). 

This is irritating, even when I have a relationship with the company, which isn’t always the case. 

Then there are the subject lines that promise more than they deliver. Often, I click through to one that practically says the world is ending, only to find that it’s for a webinar three weeks hence.  

But the worst offense is the sheer bad writing, and the piling up of cliches. 

I’m so tired of emails that promise “a reveal” (using that word as a noun), or of those that adopt the current overused terms from news outlets — i.e., that something is an “inflection point” or “it’s not clear what that will look like” about a topic that has no visual component.

Then there are those that use the word "marketing," say, several times within a paragraph.

Perhaps everyone is trying to do too much. 

Grammarly reports in a recent study that knowledge workers devote “nearly half their workweek — an average of 19 hours — to written communication.”  

It elaborates: “About half of this time is spent drafting communications or responding to messages from other people, most often via email.

Moreover, these workers report an 11% increase in time spent reviewing or editing materials compared to the previous year.” 

In addition, writers are often overwhelmed by the sheet number of channels.  “In fact, 84% of business leaders and 70% of knowledge workers say they have been communicating across more channels at work in the past twelve months,” Grammarly writes. “The most common channels are email, virtual and in- person meetings, and text-based chat, accounting for half the time spent communicating each week.” 

That may explain some of it. But one hopes that writers (including me) will try to maintain a certain standard — without relying on AI or Grammarly.