Long-windednessitude

Resolution: to be more concise. Succinct. Brief. Direct. (Oh, hell.)

I had my annual performance evaluation this morning. It went well overall - yay, three percent raise - but one criticism my supervisors had of me was in the "written communication" part of the matrix, for my tendency to elaborate too much or be candid beyond the bounds of my position. In formal e-mails to the entire team of the doomed project, apparently I shouldn't say things like, "let's hope it works out this time. Knock on wood." And I need to be more aware about getting to the point. If someone doesn't read all of an e-mail and screws things up because of that, I'm inclined to blame the reader on a personal level, but I have to admit I could have prevented the problem by not burying the main point of it in the first place.

On the whole, this criticism didn't surprise or bother me. H. has mentioned something like that before, and a lot of the e-mails I got dinged for were written in relatively harried and stressful situations so of course there would be some problem, and I got good reviews otherwise. So, hey, no one's perfect.

There were two reasons that it did get to me, though. First because I write in my free time right here and aspire to write even more, so written communication should ideally be one of my relative strengths, not weaknesses. And second, it just so happened that this afternoon I made exactly the same mistake in a personal e-mail as well. Making plans for this evening, my girlfriend said that she'd be getting off work early. I replied that that was cool, and in theory I could do the same based on hours worked so far this week, so it was too bad that I was so busy I'd probably have to work until the last minute. She missed the last part of that, requiring an e-mail to a third party and a call to her office interrupting her work. Heh, um, whoops.

Well, oversharing isn't a problem in a personal blog meant for reflecting about work. Practice writing is practice writing, and it gives future or hypothetical readers the idea of what my job is like. But it's funny that a post explaining my resolution to be more concise wound up being 429 words. So I'll really try to watch this in the future. As a writing exercise, maybe I should even do a more concise version of this post later just as a challenge to myself.