awkward emails

[silverflight8]

I think of this excerpt every time I struggle to write an email at work. I try to get around the issue of "this is going to be so insulting" by trying to find the perfect wording and the truth is just the truth, there's not much I can do with how I convey it.

It was only when, in her own room after Hall, she set about writing to Peter, that she realized how awkward her own task was going to be. To put down a brief explanation of her own acquaintance with Lord Saint-George and a reassuring account of his accident was child’s play. The difficulties began with the matter of the young man’s finances. Her first draft ran easily; it was slightly humorous and rather gave the benefactor to understand that his precious balms were calculated to break the recipient’s head, where other agents had not already broken it. She rather enjoyed writing this one. On reading it over, she was disappointed to find that it had an air of officious impertinence. She tore it up.

The students were making a vast noise of trampling and laughter in the corridor. Harriet briefly cursed them and tried again.

The second draft began stiffly: “Dear Peter—I am writing on behalf of your nephew, who has unfortunately—”

This one, when finished, conveyed the impression that she disapproved strongly of uncle and nephew alike, and was anxious to dissociate herself as far as possible from their affairs.

She tore it up, cursed the students again and made a third draft.

This, when completed, turned out to be a moving, and indeed, powerful piece of special pleading on the young sinner’s behalf, but contained remarkably little of the gratitude and repentance which she had been instructed to convey. The fourth draft, erring in the opposite direction, was merely fulsome.

“What the devil is the matter with me?” she said aloud. “(Damn those noisy brats!) Why can’t I write a straightforward piece of English on a set subject?”

When she had once formulated the difficulty in this plain question, the detached intellect bent meekly to its academic task and produced the answer.

“Because, however you put it, all this is going to hurt his pride damnably.”

Answer adjudged correct.

What she had to say, stripped of its verbiage, was: Your nephew has been behaving foolishly and dishonestly, and I know it; he gets on badly with his parents, and I know that, too; he has taken me into his confidence and, what is more, into yours, where I have no right to be; in fact, I know a great many things you would rather I did not know, and you can’t lift a hand to prevent it.

In fact, for the first time in their acquaintance, she had the upper hand of Peter Wimsey, and could rub his aristocratic nose in the dirt if she wanted to. Since she had been looking for such an opportunity for five years, it would be odd if she did not hasten to take advantage of it.

Slowly and with extreme pains, she started on Draft No. 5.


Dorothy L Sayers, Gaudy Night.