How to Shorten Long Gmail Messages
Chrome: I write long emails. I have to give up this habit, but I tend to err on the side of detailed answers rather than short ones. A few adverbs later and boom! It’s like reading an article from New York in your inbox.
The easiest way to break this habit is to stick a sticker on your monitor – something like “keep it short” or perhaps even “STFU”. The second easiest way is to have some way to generate statistics for the emails I’m about to send so that I can remind myself that cutting to 300 words , if not less, is the way to go.
For some obscure reason, Google hasn’t built word counting functionality directly into Gmail, even though many users have been asking for it for years . When I came across the Brief extension for Chrome, I was hoping it would be exactly what I was looking for. Instead of giving you the number of words in the Gmail message you compose, Brief counts down from 120. After you type one hundred and twenty-first words, the extension should disable the Send button, forcing you to stop chatting. (or triple-click the icon to bypass the hard limitation of the extension).
Sorry, Brief doesn’t work. There is a countdown, and the extension keeps track of words quite well (with some glitches). However, exceeding the 120 word limit does nothing; I could send an email with no limits, no matter how chatty I was.
It’s time to go for Option B: Boomerang , whose machine learning feature ” Responsive ” can also count the words in emails you send and receive, or the more versatile Word Counter Plus Chrome extension. What Word Counter Plus lacks in authority – since it won’t actually stop you from sending a rambling email – the extension makes up for with its versatile approach to text analysis.
Install the extension, highlight text in a Gmail message or webpage, and right-click. Select the “Word Counter Plus” option and you will see a pop-up window with a little more information about what you have chosen:
Not only can Word Counter Plus work when you are offline, but I am pleased to see that the extension (probably) is not tracking what you are analyzing. As its author writes in the extension’s description on GitHub : “Unlike similar word-counting extensions, this extension does not open an external web page just for counting and does not require any permissions.”
While it’s not a panacea for my wordy emails, it’s at least a quick way to check if I’m speaking too long – or if I’m using too many big words .