Habits from talking to people ยท habit 30 of 40
Saying thanks with the details
The message people write when something went right is the warmest thing they will send all week. It is usually also the most specific thing.
What it does everywhere else
Detail is what makes feedback worth reading. A review saying it was all fine tells the next person nothing, and anyone who has ever chosen anything on the strength of reviews knows the difference immediately. Naming what actually happened is a favour to strangers, and every feedback system ever built rewards it.
What it does on this one
Here that detail is the record. It is written in public, attached to an account, and it stays after the thing it describes is finished. The particulars that make it useful to the next reader are the same particulars that pin it to one event with one person at the other end.
The habit
You say thank you by naming what specifically went well, because praise without specifics is not praise.
Why it is automatic
The training came from shopping and from every service that has ever asked for a star. The form does the teaching: it asks what you got, when it turned up, whether you would recommend it. People learned to answer properly because vague feedback is useless and everybody has been misled by it at least once.
Gratitude is the other half, and it is a decent motive. Somebody did the job properly and the only currency available is a good word said in public. Not leaving one feels mean, because it is.
There is a reciprocity in it as well. Reviews exist only because other people wrote them first, and reading them while writing none is a position most people are not comfortable holding for long.
What it actually does here
Feedback is public by construction. It has to be, since a review nobody can read is not a review. The text therefore sits beside an account name, in a place built for strangers to read, for as long as that place exists.
The detail is the identifying part. Days, durations, the order things happened in, the wording of a message: those are exactly what makes an account credible to a reader and exactly what makes it a description of one occasion rather than of a general experience.
It is durable in ways the writer never controls. Feedback gets quoted, collected, mirrored and screenshotted, because gathering it up is how the next person decides anything at all.
And warmth is what carries the detail out. The most specific thing anyone writes is usually the thank you rather than the complaint, since complaints are written carefully and gratitude is written fast.
Two versions of the same thank you
Almost every warm message has a version that keeps what the next reader needs and drops what fixes it to one event. The two versions take the same time to write once you know which column each part belongs in.
| Says the useful thing | Says the identifying thing |
|---|---|
| What was good, in general terms | Exact days, durations and gaps between messages |
| That the description matched what turned up | Reference numbers and identifiers of any kind |
| That a problem was handled sensibly | A step by step account of the problem and when it happened |
| That you would deal with them again | Quoted messages, which carry the other party as well as you |
Feedback is written for the next reader
The person your review is for has one question, which is whether to go ahead. That question is answered by the general shape: whether communication was clear, whether the description was honest, whether a problem got handled without a fight. It is not answered by the calendar.
This is why the shorter version loses almost nothing. Strip out the particulars and the recommendation still stands, still reads as sincere, and still does the job the whole system exists to do.
What to do instead
Write the warm version first. Editing gratitude while feeling it produces a stilted message, and gratitude is worth sending. Then take one pass through it before it goes.
- Delete every number in it. Numbers are almost always the identifying part and almost never the useful part.
- Name the quality rather than the event: clear communication, an honest description, a problem handled without drama.
- Leave timing vague. Saying it was quick is as useful to the next reader as anything more precise, and it describes far more events than a date does.
- Keep quotations out. A quoted message is somebody else's writing and it identifies both ends of the conversation at once.
- If more precision is genuinely needed, send it to the person rather than to a public page, knowing it becomes a message with the properties set out on the page about sending things to a person.
How to notice you did it anyway
Anything you posted publicly can be read back publicly, which makes this the easiest of the five to check and the one people check least.
- Read your own feedback as a stranger and mark anything that would let a reader match it to a single occasion.
- Check whether any of it names a day, a duration or a count of anything.
- Look for quoted text, since a quotation brings somebody else into your record.
- Compare two pieces you wrote months apart and see whether the same phrases open both. Writing the way you always write explains why that matters.
- Look at what you wrote immediately after something went well, which is when the guard is lowest.
What readers ask about this habit
Is a short review not just a bad review?
Only if it says nothing. A short review that names the qualities is more useful than a long one full of dates, because the qualities are what the next reader is actually deciding on. Length and usefulness are not the same measurement.
Can I edit a review afterwards to take the details out?
Sometimes, and it changes the current version rather than the copies. Feedback is collected, quoted and photographed by people making decisions, so treat editing as an improvement and not as a removal.
Does it matter if everyone else writes detailed ones?
Not to this. What other people put in their reviews is their business and it does not change what yours describes. The comparison people usually want is with the rest of their own account, not with strangers.
Where does the rest of this fit?
Feedback is the last step of a sequence that starts long before it, and the habits from signing in and from the room around you apply to the same session. Checking back covers what is worth reviewing once afterwards.