I just want to share a small tip I’ve learned from experience when helping someone to compose a short message, such as an apology, condolences, etc. This is for when they don’t know what to say and feel lost and you’re giving them a sample to help them write their own message, but the most realistic outcome is that they’re going to use what you gave them with small modifications. And the tip is: do a good but not great job. In particular, leave an obvious improvement or two possible. I don’t mean to leave anything that would be bad if the person were to send it as-is, just something where it’s highly likely they’ll see how to improve it before sending it.

This serves several purposes.

The first is that the person will feel better if they make some modification so that they will feel like the message did come from them. When a person wants to do something to help a human connection—the purpose of sending written messages—they want it to come from them in more senses than just having been the person who hit the “send” button. (Even if that’s all they do, that’s still more than doing nothing, but it can easily feel like very little more than nothing.) Leaving an obvious improvement or two will help the person to feel like the message sent actually did come from them and not just the message, but some of its goodness.

The second purpose is that it will help the person to not feel bad about asking for help. If you want to do something and have to ask for help and then the help you receive was so overwhelmingly superior that the only changes you have the ability to make will make it worse, that will leave a bad taste in your mouth over having asked for help. In theory, of course, it shouldn’t, but we’re fallen creatures and properly appreciating other people’s superiority is very difficult for us.

A third purpose it serves is to sound more true to the person’s own voice. A person who finds the task of composing a message so difficult that he asks for help is unlikely to compose something really eloquent. If you make it too good, in an absolute sense, you make it less fit for its main purpose of connecting the person who is sending the message to the person receiving it.