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A ceramics teacher in Akron ripped my apology note apart for apologizing too much, and it changed how I write my unsent letters | Apology Letters Unsent - Thought Shares

miller.emery•5d ago

A ceramics teacher in Akron ripped my apology note apart for apologizing too much, and it changed how I write my unsent letters

I took a six week pottery class last fall at a studio in Akron, and at the end of it I wrote the instructor a thank you note that was really an apology letter in disguise. I filled half a page with sorry for being slow, sorry for wasting clay, sorry for asking dumb things about the wheel. She read it, set it down, and asked me one thing: who exactly is this apology for? Then she said if I keep writing sorry on repeat, the person reading it only hears the word, not whatever I actually wanted to say. So I went back through my shoebox of unsent letters, eleven of them going back to 2019, and almost every one opened with at least two sorries before it got to the real point. I started rewriting them with zero sorry in the first line and just putting the plain thing first, like I was wrong about the money I owed you, and it turns out the letters got shorter and way more honest. The one to my old roommate from Toledo went from a page and a half down to four lines, and those four lines finally say what I meant the whole time. So now I am curious, do other people here catch themselves stacking up sorry before they get to the actual point, and does cutting it change the letter for you or just make it feel colder?

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1 Comment

rubyk262d ago

Man, this hit home for a friend of mine too. She wrote this long email to her sister after they fought over Thanksgiving, and the first three lines were all sorry this and sorry that before she even said what she was upset about. Her sister called her and said she almost didn't read past the top because it felt like a fight she had to get through. My friend cut it down to just the real stuff, like "I felt left out when you made plans without me," and her sister actually listened instead of getting defensive. I don't think it made it colder at all, it made it clearer, because you stop hiding behind the sorry and just say the thing.