I used to always write long emails. I wanted to communicate carefully. I wanted to be clear. I wanted no misunderstandings to come back and bite me.

Now? Not only do I hate writing them, but I can’t bear to even look at ones that other people have written. I know it may have taken them five hours to write that long email that I can read in five minutes. I know they felt it was important or they wouldn’t have written it. But still, I can’t bear the thought of reading for five minutes at a time, it seems.

There are a couple of things that need to be said about that.

• One is that I need to train myself to slow down and concentrate on long emails people send me.

I can take ten minutes to read a 1,000-word email. It’s not going to kill me. Four pages. Four measly pages. When did my attention span get so bad?

This is the truth: the Internet has injured my ability to concentrate. Whereas I used to love reading long articles—five or six densely packed magazine pages were wonderful, and I hated when the text was interrupted with sidebars—I now can barely get through one page in a magazine. I now crave call-outs and sidebars and graphics. And even better? Video.

My inability to read long emails is something I need to work on. It is not a good thing—this feeling like I’m too busy to pay attention. This business of not being present in the moment. This constant pull to be doing the next thing instead of the thing in front of me.

• The second thing I have to say about long emails is that people shouldn’t write them anymore.

I do still write long emails sometimes, but now I write them not because I’m spending hours carefully communicating. Now I write them because I don’t have time to edit myself. I just kind throw up on the screen and hit “send” without even reading over what I said to see if any words or letters are missing. Without caring that my fingers often type her when my brain says he or you when my brain says your. 

But really? No one should write long emails anymore. We are speaking to a world that lives on soundbites and video clips and the wisdom found on bumper stickers. If we want to be heard, we need to be concise.

So if we must write long emails we should use subheads and bullet points and bold text, I think. To help those who read the emails to see the pertinent parts.

• But the last thing I want to say about long emails is that some long emails still draw me in.

In the end, you can write on and on and on, if what you’re saying is interesting. There is a guy who sends out a daily marketing email that I really enjoy. It’s probably not for everyone, but what he writes always interests me. For one thing, his topic interests me. But what makes me look forward to his emails each day is his voice, and that’s surprising because we don’t have a lot in common. He’s younger than I am. He’s Australian. He’s not in my political or spiritual camp, I’m fairly certain. And yet I like to read his emails.

He sends out these rather long-ish emails seven days a week and I remember thinking he was crazy when he first mentioned (in a Facebook post) that he was going to do this. I not only thought he was crazy because of the time he’d need to write all those daily emails. I also thought, “That’s crazy. It’s too much. People don’t have time to read that much.”

But here he comes into my inbox every day with these conversational emails, with stories that share interesting bits of his life and that illustrate some point he’s making, and I find myself reading them all the way through without getting bored or distracted.

So that bit I said about how we ought not write long emails because no one has time to read long emails? Maybe that’s just not true. Maybe we will all find time to concentrate and read if a thing interests us.

So take this into consideration when you query me, I guess. Shorter is better than longer, but interesting trumps it all. Heck! Take that into consideration when you’re writing anything. Blog posts. Books. Facebook status updates. Shorter is better than longer, but interesting trumps it all.