Experiencing Email Anxiety? You’re Not Alone.
“Can you help me write this email?”
If you’ve ever gotten this question from a peer, or asked it yourself, you’re familiar with email anxiety. Coworkers used to Slack me, text me, or come to my cubicle to ask for help with relatively innocuous emails. They were terrified that they wouldn’t “sound professional” enough.
Why is it so frightening to write out what we’re thinking?
In their book Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Joseph M. Williams and Joseph Bizup argue that it all comes down to our education.
“Generations of students have struggled with dense writing, many thinking they weren’t smart enough to grasp a writer’s deep ideas. Some have been right about that, but more could have blamed the writer’s inability (or refusal) to write clearly.”
The authors we read in academic spaces write in long-winded, complicated sentences, full of words that are hard to understand. This trend may very well be deliberate in academia: a history of classism has carefully crafted a technical vocabulary designed to keep the “unlearned” out and the privileged few “in the know.” There’s the language we speak at home, and there’s the language you need to invest thousands of dollars to develop—the language of the studious, the learned, the professional.
Williams and Bizup state that this overly-complicated language, “is in its extreme forms a language of exclusion that a democracy cannot tolerate.”
For some demographics—such as people of color, immigrants, or those who are the first in their families to get office jobs—this split can sometimes feel unsurmountable. “That’s just not how I was taught to speak at home,” a coworker once told me when I tried to encourage him to just write what he was thinking in an email. “I don’t know how to sound professional.”
When my email-anxious coworkers spoke, I understood them perfectly. But when they faced the screen, a cloud of complicated words they felt they had to use loomed over them: pretentious-sounding “therefore” and “additionally,” or buzzwords like “leverage” or “circle back” that everyone else adopted. Their voices did not feel compatible with corporate jargon. They felt that they either sounded too informal or like complete impostors.
But despite what we’ve been made to think by an entire upbringing’s-worth of bad literature, employers aren’t actually interested in “gobbledygook.” A study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that American employers value accuracy and clarity over grammar when it comes to writing emails, presentations, and reports. It’s not about sounding fancy. (For example, your middle school teachers may have insisted that you should never start a sentence with “but.” I did that twice in the last two paragraphs, yet you understood me just fine.)
That’s not to say that stream-of-consciousness writing is the way to go. Insecure writers often create rambling sentences and combine text-message abbreviations with words pulled out of a dictionary, with confusing results. Effective workplace writing is about getting your ideas across clearly, which takes training—but it doesn’t mean taking on a fake persona.
In the next article, we’ll take a look at the elements of clear workplace communication, and how you can conquer your email anxieties by keeping it simple.
So when “be yourself” doesn’t cut it as writing advice, don’t reach for the thesaurus. At Word Conscious, we like to approach building a “professional voice” like polishing a gem: you have all the rough material right in front of you—you just need to work on making it shine. Don’t adopt a persona: get comfortable in your own professional voice through practical exercises and a few key reference guides to help you overcome imposter syndrome.
As we work towards a more inclusive and efficient workplace, we need to eliminate the expectation of overcomplicated language from our minds—and from our inboxes.
Have you struggled with email anxiety? What tools have helped you overcome it?