Strongly Worded Emails

There are few greater joys in life than the creation of a strongly worded email. I have an innate love for the medium. It is an art form that sits at the intersection of literature, warfare, and therapy. Strongly worded emails are, perhaps, the most completely backwards form of communication that the human race has ever created. Bureaucracy manifest. A primal scream typed in twelve-point Arial.

The inciting incident triggers a low hum of rage. In a pre-digital age, one might have stormed into an establishment and demanded to see the manager. But we do not live in that world. The only weapon left to the modern warrior is the keyboard. And so, the decision is made. One cracks the knuckles. One opens a new draft.

Writing a truly strongly worded email is an endeavour not for the faint of heart. It often begins with difficulty in finding the perfect contact. Frequently it is tricky to find the email to which one can send their screed. They are wary of the strongly worded emailist and have constructed moats surrounding their fortresses.

One must research and study. Devote themselves completely and without restraint to crawling through policies and website footers to find a lead until an email address-shaped chink in their armour is discovered.

Artistry of a noble craft lies in the drafting phase. One asserts that they are not some lunatic raving on the street corner. They are a studied and deliberate scholar of language, penning an opus. One researches and studies the situation, constructing a strong and compelling argument that borders on rant without crossing the line.

It is prepared with the greatest of care and deliberation. Umming and ahhing about the perfect combination of diction. Words are deleted at the same rate they’re typed. ‘I’m furious’ is a wet, sputtering match that doesn’t cut it. ‘I am writing to express my profound dissatisfaction’ is far better, colder, and more clinical.

Studied analysis for logical fallacies or inclusion of potential ammunition for the receiving party. You cannot admit fault – you must be the innocent victim of their incompetence. Each typo is eradicated, for it could serve as munition for return fire. A thesaurus is consulted for a word packing an extra morsel of scathing impact while not venturing into outright assault.

You walk a precarious line. You know as well as any that being too polite will result in your words being ignored, and being too aggressive will have you branded ‘do not interact’. You toe the line and with great difficulty settle on a removed icy tone of menace. You share it around with those whose support you’ve garnered, with each offering their own striking tweaks.

Then the time comes to send it. The ‘to’ address is direct and pointed; the blast radius is extended to those in the CC field – the equivalent of calling for a manager at a busy establishment. You’re garnering an audience. A subject line with a carefully calculated amount of intrigue to prompt a click but not enough information to give the game away is loaded into the cannon.

And finally, the signature. The ultimate tonal indicator. One must decide between the chilly professionalism of a simple ‘Regards,’ (prefixed with ‘Kind’ if particularly daring), the feigned warmth of ‘Best,’ or the nuclear option of omitting a sign-off entirely—leaving only one’s name standing naked at the bottom of the page, a monolith of dissatisfaction. It is a subtle art, signalling to the recipient exactly how much of their remaining day they should spend worrying about you.

Wisdom suggests a ‘cooling off’ period. One should save the draft and return to it the next day with a cooler head. But the strongly worded email demands immediacy. It is a perishable good. To let it sit is to let the rage curdle into apathy. No, it must be sent while the blood is hot and the typos are invisible to the angry eye.

Send. Sending. Sent.

Over the web it launches. Through the pipes of the internet. It locks onto their inbox and neatly deposits itself among the rest of their incomings. There it sits, for do you know how much effort it takes to ignore an email in an inbox? None at all.

The first few hours are a high-wire act of anticipation. Every notification sound, every vibrating pocket, every blink of the screen sends a shot of adrenaline through the strongly worded emailist. You track the status of the sent message with the grim focus of a sniper. Did they open it? When? Did the ‘CC’ recipients flag it for attention? A part of you, the primal, righteous part, expects the digital equivalent of a full-scale corporate alarm. Some sort of frantic internal meeting, an urgent huddle to address the linguistic missile that just landed on their doorstep. Klaxons and all.

If you get a response at all, the language is flat, neutered of all urgency, and utterly indifferent to the hours you spent polishing your syntax. Your carefully constructed arguments are boiled down to ‘feedback’, your profound dissatisfaction reduced to ‘inconvenience’.

In many cases a strongly worded email has the same efficacy as writing your thoughts on a bit of paper, folding it into a paper plane, and throwing it into your nearest volcano. In fact, the whole endeavour is hugely less effective than the graceful arc of a brick with a note wrapped around it thrown from a moving vehicle cascading through a previously pristine glass window.

Yet, in life, there are few greater pleasures than the catharsis of sending a strongly worded email. Of course, nothing will come of it. That email will be piped directly into a ‘deleted’ folder, or perhaps you’ll get a cookie-cutter reply, but as people frequently say when I buy gifts for them, ‘It’s the thought that counts.’

The efficacy adapts with scale. For a small outfit, a strongly worded email can be a big deal, but for a large multinational, it is water off a duck’s back. And yet, we still write them. We persist in sharpening our adjectives and polishing our syntax. We know nothing comes of them, yet we will hit send and stare at the screen, grimly satisfied.

For the above, strongly worded emails are my favourite form of communication. Largely pointless, generally a waste of time, and arguably beneficial to both sides. The sender often gets catharsis, and yet the receiver is usually largely unaffected, having served only as the necessary vessel for an exquisite, if doomed, act of personal defiance. The rage is spent, the inbox is momentarily quiet, and the only window that has had a brick thrown through it is the one inside the soul.