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My wife hates those with burning passion. I used it exactly once and then learned not to. Part of the reason is that people doing it don't put EOM to terminate
by TeMPOraL 2y ago
My wife hates those with burning passion. I used it exactly once and then learned not to.
Part of the reason is that people doing it don't put EOM to terminate the title. But the other part is that MUAs love to truncate the subject line for display because "UX", and the most popular ones (like GMail web interface, or Outlook) are janky - so in the end, what happens is, you have to open that email anyway, and then you see just signature with nothing above, and the obvious first thought is, "that stupid email client broke again", followed by "or the sender accidentally clicked 'send' before writing the message", both of which are much more likely than someone using subject-line-only message.
Doesn't also help that most normies can't communicate to save their lives, so the title is gibberish and full of typos. There's a minimum volume of text you need to error-correct that, and subject line alone isn't enough.
- aitchnyu 2y agoAre you talking about English-native people when you mean normies? Is the whole world plagued by gibberish, meandering sentences and ghosting?
- becquerel 2y agoIf they do, then I would agree with them.
- dave4420 2y agoNative English speaker here. The number of times I’ve returned to a message I’ve left in a slack/forum thread to find typos, missing words etc is embarrassing. I can’t imagine my emails would be any better.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoI'm talking about English-natives, ESL, and Polish people, as my experience is limited to the languages I can read well enough to tell what's typo or careless writing (or autocorrect on the phone + not giving a frak). Extrapolating from the Internet experience, however, I believe it's likely the whole world is plagued by gibberish. Stuff like, to use a recent real example, "hey i dont see your emails in orgs SENT AILFOX", which I was asked by the recipient to translate to real language, and which turned out to mean "Hey, so I am an impatient idiot and couldn't wait 15 seconds for our janky SaaS mail interface to load before shooting you a passive-aggressive message". (Whenever I start thinking too many good thoughts about humanity and people in general, I get shown stuff like this to be reminded that niceness and good communication exist only in sci-fi shows.) I'm not sure what you mean by "ghosting" in this context, but if you mean the situation where you ask more that one question in your message, and the recipient silently ignores all of them except the least important one, then yes, that's something I witnessed in both Polish and English from people from all around the world. I assume it generalizes too. As for meandering sentences, that's a different subject to being careless and not giving a frak - but there's a reason summarization is one of the most popular uses of LLMs.
- caseyy 2y agohey yea many speak like this yea no time 4 books apols By this, they mean, “Hello. Many people write like they speak, not in a lengthy way. It happens due to a lack of time, do you agree? Nevertheless, I apologize.” Then again, it's still extremely poor communication whether they put it in an email subject or body.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoI'm not that picky. I'm okay with missing punctuation, or not capitalizing the start of sentence, and such - I write like this myself all the time, though on IMs specifically (where it used to be common to press <enter> at the end of a thought, not at the end of a sentence). I'm okay with occasional typo. I'm not okay with text that's hard to impossible to parse due to the sheer volume of errors. And I'm not okay with lack of care behind sending "write-only" messages. Surely, if the sender read what they wrote, they'd realize that "yea no tim 3 bokS APSL" is not comprehensible. It's merely decodable, with significant effort. (Notice the difference between your example and mine is that yours lacks the distinctive set of typos/errors made by someone who types on a phone, badly. In fact, guessing what kind of device one uses is helpful - but sometimes insufficient - in decoding the gibberish :).)
- mr_mitm 2y agoIn my company, it's somewhat common to use "SO:" at the front of the subject, meaning "Subject only". This would address your point about MUAs truncating the subject and work just as well. Maybe it would be helpful to put "SO means 'subject only'" or something in the body, which could be automated, to further decrease confusion.