There was a short post in June with a title that does all the work: If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort. It did 1,753 points, and I have thought about it most weeks since.
The argument is small and hard to escape. When you send someone something to read, you are asking for a slice of a finite life. The only evidence you have that you did not waste it is the effort you visibly put in before you asked.
That used to be automatic. Nobody wrote three pages by accident. The length itself was the receipt.
Now length is free, and so the receipt is worthless. A four-paragraph message means nothing about how much thought went into it. So all of us are recalibrating, quickly and mostly unconsciously, on what counts as evidence of effort, and we do not know yet.
I notice I now trust the message with a specific number in it, the one that references something only this person could know, the one that is shorter than it needed to be. And I have started skimming the polished ones. That is new, and it is a little sad, because the polished ones used to be the good ones.
There is a version of this that turns into paranoia, and I want to avoid it. Plenty of people write well without a model, and treating fluency as a red flag punishes exactly the wrong people, including every non-native speaker who worked hard to get fluent.
So the rule I have settled on is about what I send. Before I ask anyone for their attention now, I check that there is something in the message that could only have come from me having thought about it. It might be a number I looked up, a specific disagreement, or the part where I say I am not sure.
If there is nothing like that in there, I do not send it.
The post is a five-minute read.
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