A note upon his desk "PS Bring me home and have me"

[venta]

Note for geeks: you may be disappointed. This is not about page description languages (see the dots?)

On Wednesday, I wrote what I hope was an entertaining email to one of my colleagues apologising for the fact that, in his absence, I'd broken his mug. It was a rather handsome mug with Brunel on the side, and I inadvertently batted it across the room while sitting on said colleague's desk doing an impression of a surprised North Korean soldier (it was all hjalfi's fault).

Yesterday, I received an entertaining (and, in the circs, gracious) reply by email from said colleague. It finished:

PS I don't suppose you have a video of the incident do you ?[*]

I don't, of course.

However, it got me thinking: in the days[**] when we did arcane things like writing letters on paper with pens, a postscript was a perfectly sensible thing. It said oh, and here's something I forgot to put in the letter before I signed off. PPS was there for the really absent-minded.

But in email, there is no justification for using a PS. Text can easily be added anywhere in the mail before you send it - anything genuinely forgotten usually has to be sent in a second email. So, either some bizarre sense of honesty makes people add a PS to show that something was forgotten or, much more likely, it has become a Device.

You can stick a humorous afterthought in a PS, and it has more impact than if it had just been trailing along at the end of the letter. You can, if you're feeling particularly guilty, hide a statement you don't want to make in a PS and hope that its impact will be lessened or it won't be noticed at all. You can use it as a sort of Easter egg, an extra smile for a reader who thought they'd finished reading. Or none of the above.

So tell me, o LJ, for I am curious: do you use P.S. regularly ? If so why, and for what reason ? Do you regard it as a epistolatory appendix, doomed in these easy days of cut and paste ?

[*] Note for bateleur: it would appear tpr has the same bad habit with spacing that I do.
[**] Like yesterday, in my case.

Comments

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

It's also a good place to dump an in-joke which always reinforces your relationship with the recipient, but would be obtrusive or inappropriate in the main text.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Surely that's what footnotes are for :)

Actually, I do think footnotes are (the way I use them) often rather lazy, and at the expense of the reader's convenience means I don't have to try and work my sentences out cleverly.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

A footnote seems a bit over-formal for an email¹ -- and wouldn't it get lost in the sig and gubbins that email clients seem to add these days?

---

1 At least, for the kinds that I write.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I don't regard the sort of footnotes[1] that I use as all that formal. I also don't have a sig, and I've carefully selected my email provider to be someone who doesn't add reams of cack to my mail.

Except mail sent from work, which does have obligatory ream of legalistic cack. I mostly don't footnote work mails.

[1] see original text above

[metame.livejournal.com]

epistolatory appendix

Excellent turn of phrase, and I suspect a trained surgeon will have you fit as a fiddle in no time.

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

I see it as a device to be used sparingly.

PS Thanks for a very thought provoking post :-)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I do use P.S. in emails quite regularly. Most commonly I do it when I want to add a non-essential off topic item to an email. This is usually humorous in nature, but not always. (eg. "P.S. - The cake was yummy!")

The other time I use P.S. is, ironically, to draw attention to an important element of an email which might be skimread. (eg. "P.S. - I will be offline from 3pm today.")

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Snap to both of these uses, although I don't think I use either regularly.

[thefon.livejournal.com]

Me too

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

yep - PS is for an off topic snippet that isn't worth sending as its own email in this context. It doesn't get used in letters I type, and does in hand-written notes etc.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Me ... err ... whatever the next incremental is ...

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Occasionally, for effect. It has a similar effect to "Do you see what I did there?" but is considerably less annoying, by virtue of being much shorter to type and thus much quicker to read.

If there is no justification for it in e-mail - and I can see your point - then there is just as little justification for it in word-processed documents in general. It's a truism that marketing documents frequently include postscripts because the text in them is somehow more likely to have attention be paid to it, but given that it's all word-processed, it overtly is a Device - and a dishonest one, at that.

[metame.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that "ETA" (and a summary of a change) or replying to one's own comment/mail has replaced PS as the "oh yes, I forgot that".

Might be worth trying PS as the text content of those emails which say at present "Now with the attachment" or "oops, forget the actual file".

[venta.livejournal.com]

ETA throws me every time, because I read it as "estimated time of arrival" rather than (I assume) "edited to add".

I do regularly use "PS..." as a subject line if I realise I've forgotten something, though usually not if what I forgot was to attach a file.

I wonder what percentage of emails which say "see attachment" don't actually contain the attachment. I know quite a high proportion of mine don't.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

gmail has a missing attachment detector which I believe works by detecting such phrases and then checking for an attachment...
I have it turned on but haven't forgotten an attachment to test it yet.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

That sounds clever! -- I'll have to give it a go.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

It's not clever (but it does work).

It gets confused if you reply to an email from someone who sent an attachment and quote the sentence with the word "attached" or "attachment" in it. That's how clever it is!

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

So does Thunderbird. I think it just looks for the words "attachment" and "attached". I'm sure I've had false positives before.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

I only use "ETA" when I'm editing after the initial posting of the comment.

PS I use for things I've thought of just before sending, but can't easily fit into the main text without considerably more editing than I can be arsed with.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I use PS as a way to put in things that don't fit in the rest of the email, for example:

"I haven't thought about it yet but will come up with some ideas before meeting. Monday is fine, will print out and bring the things you asked.

Jo

ps: That's a very short holiday!"

PS

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I just realised if I use a PS it's usually for something more informal than the rest of the email.

Or a forgotten part of an LJ comment, since only paid users can edit them!

Re: PS

[venta.livejournal.com]

Really ? I didn't know that (I'm a paid use, I can edit, I didn't realise unpaid users couldn't).

Re: PS

[venta.livejournal.com]

And mostly I edit to correct typos, like making 'use' into 'user' above!

[pm215]

A quick check of some of my sent mail shows that a common pattern for how I use it goes:

> quoted para from my correspondent

Text from me in response to that.

> more text from correspondent

Response to second paragraph.

PS: something which isn't directly related to any of the text I'm replying to but which I've thrown in anyway.

...so it acts in some way as a flag that what follows is no longer directly responding to the email I'm replying to. This also works in emails that aren't replies, as a separation of the major point of the email from a random side issue or observation.