A Message for the Recipient
Business culture likes brevity, intellectual culture likes completeness. A good message does not choose between them in the abstract: it gives the particular recipient exactly the context needed to understand and to act.
Before an important message it helps to work out:
What does the other person need to understand?
What do they have to decide or do?
What information is needed for that?
Better to start with the main thing:
I need to move the meeting to Thursday.
There is an error in the calculation.
I don’t agree with this condition.
I need your help.
After that — the reason and the details.
Many people start with the backstory, afraid of sounding blunt. As a result someone spends several minutes listening to an account of the weather, the traffic and organisational culture while trying to guess whether he has been fired or has just parked in the wrong place.
Brevity does not mean dryness. In a personal conversation the details can be the whole of life. A story, a joke and a digression are valuable for more than efficiency.
But when a decision is needed, structure helps:
1. the main conclusion;
2. the necessary context;
3. the expected action;
4. a check on understanding.
Information has been transmitted not when the words have been said, but when the other person has understood a sufficiently close meaning.
So after a difficult conversation it helps to ask:
How did you understand this?
What did we agree on?
What are you going to do next?
The phrase “is that clear?” usually gets an automatic “yes.” Even when almost nothing is clear. Asking someone to restate the decision takes a little more work and therefore yields real information.
A written message also has to be read through the recipient’s eyes. Words that are neutral to the author can sound like a threat, sarcasm or an order. Especially in short correspondence, where the tone is left to the reader’s imagination, and that imagination is not always kind.
The main point has to survive the journey. The rest can follow in the next message.
The structure of a message depends not only on the author’s thought, but on what the recipient already knows, what decision they are making and how much attention they can spare.
Someone who explains the obvious in detail may think the other person is uninformed. Someone who shares intimate details with a near-stranger assumes a different level of closeness. The author of a long message about a technical problem may not notice that the recipient only needs the repair deadline.
Before a message it helps to picture:
- what the person already knows;
- what they actually need;
- how much attention they can give;
- what decision they are making;
- which meanings they will find especially easy to get wrong.
This does not mean adjusting to every expectation or treating the audience as incapable of complexity.
But the same text does not suit a child, a specialist, an executive and a person who has just been woken by the call.
A wrong model of the listener produces two typical defects:
- the speaker explains too little, because he has known the subject for years;
- he explains too much, because he wants to display the full volume of his own work.
In both cases the recipient is used as scenery.
Good communication starts not with the question “what do I want to say?” but with a couple of questions:
The written channel is especially useful where meaning has to outlive the participants’ memory, but it also requires thinking about the trace a conversation leaves behind.
A letter, a message or minutes let you: formulate a thought, check the data, convey a complex structure, record a decision, reduce differences between recollections and bring in people who were not present.
At the same time the written channel is slower at resolving emotional and ambiguous questions. A long exchange sometimes exists only because the participants are afraid of a ten-minute conversation.
Voice and video are better when: the question is urgent, things need clarifying quickly, tone and reaction matter, conflict is growing, the subject is easier to show, and the participants have to invent a solution together.
After such a conversation it helps to record the outcome in writing:
We agreed to do the following…
A letter also leaves a trace. That is both an advantage and a risk. Do not send a text that will destroy a relationship or a reputation if someone outside the original context sees it.
At the same time, fear of forwarding should not turn work communication into contentless cipher.
A good business text answers the questions:
- what happened;
- what we want;
- what is required from the recipient;
- by when;
- what materials are attached.
Writing can be a way of thinking, but with generative AI a smooth text no longer proves the thought was assembled by the author. Contradictions can now meet conveniently in someone else’s draft while the sender only picks the “send” button.
AI is useful as an editor of the first version: it can suggest a structure, cut, translate, change the tone and point out ambiguity. That lowers the cost of wording, but it does not transfer responsibility.
The author of a message is still answerable for the facts, the promises, the recipients, the data disclosed and the decision to send. You can delegate a sentence. You cannot delegate understanding of what exactly you are asserting and what obligations the letter creates.
A work document should also not be pasted thoughtlessly into an external service. Before uploading you need to know whether transferring this data is permitted, how it is stored and whether it contains personal, medical, commercial or otherwise protected information.
The ordering gets tested on a letter to a contractor. “We have received your certificate of completion, thank you for the work, I would separately note the difficulty of the site, and following the acceptance inspection some issues have come up…” — by this point the reader has already decided everything is fine and is skimming. “We are not signing the certificate, two assemblies have to be replaced, details below” solves the same task in the first line, and the thanks live quite happily at the end. The politeness in the first version has not gone anywhere; it has just held up the main point for four lines and devalued itself.
The main point at the end works where suspense holds the reader. In work correspondence he is held by a deadline, and everything before the conclusion reads as delay.