5 ms·
"When you’re reading your prose right after writing it down, you’re hearing what you wanted to say, not what the text actually spells out. It helps to add a bit
by pcurve 4y ago
"When you’re reading your prose right after writing it down, you’re hearing what you wanted to say, not what the text actually spells out. It helps to add a bit of time between writing, proofreading, and hitting “send”.
Seems like the only way I discover errors in my emails is AFTER I hit the SEND button. It's shocking how many errors I find in emails no matter how many times I proofread them.
- teucris 4y agoFor years I had “delay send” enabled on all email for this very reason. I forget how long the delay was - probably only a few minutes - which was important because then the recognition of urgency helped catch mistakes.
- daveguy 4y agoThe same thing happens to me. This is why I put a 30 second delay between send button and actual send (maybe 10s on outlook365... I think that's the max.) I send much better emails with that speed bump in place.
- sph 4y agoOne thing I love about HN is the generous edit times. If @dang could check, I bet I am the person that edits their comment the most on this site. Not to change my ideas, but fixing typos, expanding, clarifying, maybe delete unnecessarily inflammatory sentences. A comment of this length might go through 5 iterations at least—but this time I'm trying to get it right once and refrain from editing it.
- dwringer 4y agoThere's also a delay feature which can be handy if you are the kind of person like me who finds yourself realizing no amount of editing can salvage an impulsively conceived and unnecessary comment. Still better to think before you type; I'm working on that one day at a time.
- sph 4y agoIs the delay in minutes or seconds? I can't set it to more than 10, so I assume minutes. I had it set to 1.
- dwringer 4y agoIt is in minutes, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024 I note that it specifically mentions being a window for edits prior to the comments going out in RSS feeds, and not intended explicitly as a deletion window, so it's still probably best not to make posts and then delete them (I used to have a pretty bad habit about it until the mods reached out).
- trasz2 4y agoSame, but it also reminds me of another thing: I think it was the Solaris format(1M) utility; instead of the usual “y/n” question before performing a destructive action it said something like “will proceed with overwriting XXX in 15 seconds; press ^C to abort”.
- k__ 4y agoI always tell myself to leave one day buffer, so I can read a draft after a night of sleep, but I always finish writing right on the deadline...
- simonw 4y agoI've started leaning into this with my blog. I post entries as soon as they don't completely suck, then follow up with edits over the next few minutes / hours. The alternative is leaving posts in eternal draft mode while I sweat over the details. I find putting them live and editing-in-production makes me much more likely to actually publish!
- Breza 4y agoI have the same tendency. In Outlook, I use CTRL-Enter to send my emails but I haven't turned off the confirmation dialog. It's a weird mental hack, but I hit CTRL-Enter to "send" the email then realize that I made a mistake. But I haven't accepted the dialog, so I hit cancel.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]