I'm just going to have a yell about how much I hate emails.
To preface this - I'm not a diagnosed dyslexic, however it runs in my family and if you've known me for any length of time I'd say you have surmised that I am fairly useless in the syntax, spelling, tone, coherence, tense and especially pluralisation part of language. I love to communicate, but writing is like pulling teeth for me. Some teeth are worse than other, so there are graded types of writing, tweeting isn't too bad, but I fuck it up all the time. Fb posts are ok, because I can edit them and I get to choose when I participate in the conversation. Instant messaging isn't terrible either because it's expected to be casual, and I can rely heavily on emojis to correct tone, blogging isn't too much of a hassle because because the stakes couldn't be lower. But emailing is THE WORST! Every time I receive a new email that expects a response I feel angry and sad and exhausted as soon as it drops into my inbox. Because even a two sentence email reply will take about an hour to draft and send off for me, 20 minutes to draft it so I'm sure it actually makes sense, 40 minutes minimum before I check the presently invisible typos in it and yet STILL, 50% of emails I send will have errors in them. I have been seriously trying to correct this in myself for almost 15 years, as the years pile up it's starting to feel like maybe this is an unfixable trait!? I can put all the care and vigilance and practise in and most time the result is for naught.
And maybe I only know arseholes but I swear I cannot go a week or even a few days on social media without being reminded by someone that they will judge you when you fuck up in the written word. Even people who are generous about it, will admit to not being able to shift personal biases regarding class and intelligence when they see someone linguistically cocking up. All of these effects are multiplied when it's in a professional sense of course. Simply put emailinig is exhausting, every email I get feels like another great opportunity to get judged on a thing that I seemingly cannot fix -I believe they're commonly called learning diabilities- and all I can do is pour effort into an unfillable ditch of dyslexia hoping I'll pass for average. I know there's a lot of reasons out there to hate professional emailing, but well, this one is mine, there are many like it but this one is estimated to effect 5-10% of the population.
edit - though I appreciate the gesture and the kindness at the core of it, suggesting i use spell check or asking if I’ve heard of dyslexic friendly fonts, grammar checks etc comes across a little like I’ve never tried to fix this. I’ve been trying to fix/mitigate this my whole life. I promise I do implement anything I’ve come across that actually helps or mitigates this, and I’m always on the look out for new tools.
