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I have a sneaking suspicion that I write far better than I speak. This is probably not hard as I can usually spell and text never gets lost through lack of volume or mumbling. As words get read at the speed of the reader rather than the writer, they are also not lost in rapid fire speech through which it is almost impossible to ascertain where one word ends and the next one begins – unlessyouwritelikethiswhichIdon’t. My father will tell you it was an uphill battle to get me to stop talking this once upon a time. There is a little more to being well written though. I used to tell people that I frequently write the way I speak. And I do in part, seeing as I have no problem beginning this sentence with a conjunction. I still however find it particularly painful to end a written sentence with a preposition and tend to use ‘business English’ quite comfortably.

Normally I don’t think much about the way I write, but yesterday a collection of things brought it to my attention. Three of those were non-related comments on work emails I had written. I needed to communicate to some foreign suppliers what was to be sent to Australia, explain to a government body why we were in breach of their requirements (we got let off btw) and request information from a freight company. Each of the three audiences was quite different I guess and the individual colleagues that had been copied in on my emails all made positive comments. This was cool but as it happened on the same day, kind of weird as well. The other thing that made me think about the way I write was a column on internet dating.

Comments made in response to this column talked about the fact that personalities were sometimes quite different in the flesh than they were over the computer. I have experienced that myself and can easily see how it might happen. It is of course an awful lot easier to edit what you write (I have already edited the above) than it is to moderate your speech whilst you are speaking. Well, for a lot of us it is anyway. Quite frankly for some of us, attempting to moderate speech is somewhat akin to shutting the barn door once the horse has already bolted. I’m sure this has something to do with why I’ve been on more first dates than second ones. Via email, its almost as if you have extra time to work on your personality. You never get to the punch line before you get to the joke and it becomes easier to shape other people’s impressions of you.

You have the opportunity over the net of only showing your good side. With internet dating, the initial emails are usually fun, get-to-know-you type missives and they never seem the right place to explain just how scathing you can get when you’re furious. You would most probably give the wrong impression if you were to issue a list early on outlining all the actions guaranteed to tick you off no matter how much you may wish to do just that. Any previous violent tendencies like wanting to kick someone where the sun don’t shine hard enough that they’ll be trying to swallow their tonsils for a week would likewise make you sound somewhat unbalanced – that fact that you’d never do such a thing is irrelevant. So all in all, email certainly does have its advantages bit it is still frustrating that the natural element is missing. And that my emails seem more exciting than I am at the moment - even to me!