Relax. You’re among a large crowd of (slightly confused) friends.

You’re experiencing iPhone Fragmail Syndrome.

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Hand a client a smartphone and the anytime/anywhere road warrior attitude that goes with it, and while they’re clearing their inbox and giving themselves high fives for efficiency, you’re trying to piece together an actionable answer from ambiguous, incomplete, typo-obscured emails.

Fragmails.

I recently asked a client for feedback on an ad concept.

“like, but hiher” was the “Sent from my iPhone” response.

Uhh, OK.

I asked another to approve their company bio, which I included in the body of the email.

“Add more xtensve and delete enterprise” came back.

Yeah. I’ll get right on that (the word “enterprise” wasn’t in the bio).

I know it’s a shocking concept, but detailed answers sometimes demand emails with upwards of a dozen words, which your average smartphone user thinks is at least six too many.

Some also don’t seem to be reading the original emails very closely, at least those who answer my three neatly bulleted questions with a single, unformed answer.

Welcome, my fellow freelancers, to a bold new age of instant communication.

Unfortunately, it’s as incoherent as it is speedy.

And we haven’t even touched on the concept of autocorrect, which can turn an email into a sexual harassment suit faster than you can say Damn You Autocorrect.

There is no known cure for iPhone Fragmail Syndrome. In fact, most of the perpetrators seem awfully proud of themselves, and therein lies the problem; “Sent from my iPhone” is not only a branding statement that would make PT Barnum smile, it’s also a considered a Get Out of Jail Free card for what came before it, which just might be incomprehensible.

Since I’ve yet to convince anyone to write an answer in longhand and then send me an iPhotograph of it (this works on a surprising number of levels), I’m simply going to turn lemons into a fizzy lemon beverage; I’m adding the title of “Puzzlemaster” to my LinkedIn profile and powerful cryptology software to my PC.

Kep Writg, Tom Chandler.

Client contact is a lot harder and the lack of services sometimes rankles, but there are compensations:

Keep writing (when you’re not looking out the window), Tom Chandler

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We’re seeing an explosion in video, and little surprise; many of the technical (and affordability) hurdles have fallen, and what’s left is the usual “Great ideas and hard work” stuff that writers have always faced.

It’s not a bad time to be a videomaker…

Keep writing (and filming), Tom Chandler.

After my daughter appropriated the iPad I’d originally bought for work purposes, I craftily acquired an Android Tablet. I wanted to know what all the noise was about — and see if tablets would prove useful in my writing life.

So far, my answer is “not very.”

My 10″ Toshiba Thrive tablet (slightly bigger than an iPad, but comes with HDMI and USB ports) is handy for checking emails and surfing, but it hasn’t yet proven useful for presentations, and it definitely hasn’t become a preferred writing tool.

Or even a particularly useful one.

In fact, when I stumble across a post or email demanding a lengthy reply, I’ll usually “share” it with myself, figuring I’ll deal with it when I’ve got a keyboard.

And therein lies the problem.

For writers, you can’t beat a good keyboard, a reality uber Sci-Fi writer Charlie Stross cops to in this post:

The iPad is primarily targeted as a media consumption device. Yes, I get that. Apple are focusing on speech (via Siri) as a next-generation tool for conversational interaction with iOS devices. I get that, too. But if iOS is going to reach its true potential as the next generation of general computing, then among other things, it needs a vastly better text input system. The current one is so poor that I’m not writing this blog entry using it. That’s a warning sign. It ought to be a no-brainer that the iPad (or an equivalent 10″ touchscreen tablet running Android) should be usable by a writer. It has a brilliant battery life by laptop standards, weighs two-thirds as much as Apple’s lightest Macbook Air, and has a range of text editors and word processing apps available. So why am I not using it?

He’s not using it for the same reason I’m not writing this post on my tablet.

It’s painful to do so.

Your Fingers Do The Talking

Writers use keyboards, and the out-of-the-box touchscreen keyboards on iPad and Android tablets are awful.

In fact, the included keyboards don’t even offer cursor keys. And moving by words, sentences or paragraphs isn’t part of the standard text editor.

After you’ve tried to edit out that six-words-ago typo using your finger, you too will curse those who thought cursor keys were optional.

Fortunately, my Android tablet made installing a cursor-equipped touchscreen keyboard relatively easy (I don’t think iPad users are similarly blessed), and that improved things a lot.

It just wasn’t enough.

I even applied the Coffeehouse Test, where I ask myself what I’d take to the local caffeine joint if I needed to write catalog copy.

My Starling (Linux) Netbook

• Reasonable keyboard
• Light and portable
• I can happily write on the thing for hours
• Runs the powerful editors I love (Emacs, Komodo Edit, Sublime Text)
• Productive mutli-tasking environment

My Tablet

• Has a terrible keyboard
• Is hard to read it on a flat surface (like a table)
• Supports only simple editors
• Best at doing one thing at a time

Simply adding a bluetooth keyboard to the tablet might solve some of the issues, but now you’ve got two pieces of gear that serve the same function as one netbook.

It’s not exactly a big win for the tablet.

Stop Talking

Some point to speech-to-text input as the Next Big Thing in writing technology, but frankly, it won’t wash.

First, go to that coffeehouse and try to get some work done.

After you’ve been thrown out, pick yourself off the sidewalk, go home, and use that speecgh tool to enter information into a note while you’re talking on the phone.

Finally, dictating an email isn’t horrible.

But I’ve tried dictating copy, and it’s a mess.

The same is true of handwriting recognition, which is slower than typing by an order of magnitude.

The Silver Lining Is The Cloud

With the ability to replace keyboards, a built-in file browser and other goodies, I’m a lot happier with my Android tablet than I was with the iPad2 (which my three year-old pretty has converted into a dedicated Dora the Explorer device).

And despite my reservations about the thing, I like it — and recognize the need to occasionally edit or even create a short document on my tablet or smartphone.

Which is why I made all my files available on all my machines using the Ubuntu One file sharing service. (It’s built right into Ubuntu Linux, and apps are available for Android devices; Dropbox serves the same function for those still stuck on Windoze).

Because I write 90% of my work using text editors — which utilize simple text file formats — file compatibility isn’t an issue.

Screenwriters using tools like Celtx and FadeIn can use apps to edit their work right on their smartphone or tablet, and while I haven’t played with it, some people are logging into their desktop machines from their tablets.

(Working on the smartphone or tablet is typically more about guilt abatement than raw productivity, but we all make accommodations with our neuroses.)

I’m not condemning tablets; I’m suggesting they’re not much of a productivity booster for writers, at least not compared to a netbook or the new wave of “ultrabooks.”

They do fill a niche, and writers will eventually come to grips with tablet productivity. Using the cloud, basic text formats and the right apps, I’m finding a way, though not a wildly productive one.

In other words, I’m not selling my netbook.

Keep writing (one whatever tool you choose), Tom Chandler.

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The Letters of Note blog just published his rightly famous “I am a lousy copywriter” letter detailing his twelve step process for writing an ad — something I’d read years ago in a book secretly assembled by Ogilvy’s colleagues without his knowledge (The Unpublished David Ogilvy).

I basically fell in love (again) with #7 and #12 (you can see all 12 here):

1. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

2. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.

Ogilvy inveighed against irrelevant, shallow, underperforming ad campaigns, and his penchant for research — and for finding the drama inherent in every product — served an an able primer when I charged headlong into the advertising world of the 1980s.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler

Time to think about 2012

Here are three easy questions to ask yourself:

What single thing most hampered your productivity/profitability in 2011?

In 2011, my biggest productivity killer was not a client or software issue, but our child daycare situation. It was unstable, and too often my wife and I found ourselves on the wrong end of an early morning phone call that meant one of us was about to lose a workday.

In three instances it went on for a week — once when I was launching a sizable web project. Sleepless doesn’t begin to cover it.

It needs to be fixed, and it will. And you?

• Did you suffer through a series of boom/bust cycles (alternating between scrambling or sitting)?
• Did some ongoing distraction put a damper on your billable hours?
• Did a process bottleneck jam your writing/creative productivity?
• Are you trying to run a fulltime business on parttime hours?

What are your business numbers really telling you?

Freelancers are notoriously bad at interpreting the numbers, but there’s no better way to know what really happened to your business in 2011.

In my case, the numbers played out about as planned, though a bit too much revenue is coming from one client — cause for concern if you don’t have a rock solid contract. I plan to diversify a little in 2012.

• Did revenue in one segment of your business increase or decrease, and what is that telling you?
• Is too much of your time being chewed up by one client — who isn’t carrying their revenue weight?
• Are you working too far down the payscale, or on too-small projects? (Sub-question: what are you going to do about it?)

What would make your professional life better in 2012?

There’s money and there’s happiness. Ideally, you discover ways to find more of both during 2012.

I’m copping to a two-parter. First, I want to resolve an issue with one client, or simply replace them. It’s not worth the adrenaline.

On a higher level, I’m not writing much and I’m doing very little concept work (both of which I love), and while I’m not diving back into the highly competitive ad world, I am looking for more creative satisfaction in 2012. I’ve got ideas…

Maybe some of these will resonate with you:

• Tied to a client you don’t like? (Hint: get untied)
• Working below your talent level? (Hint: search out clients & projects you want to write)
• Working in a part of the industry that bores you? (Hint: A career involves some staying power; better spend it doing something that interests you.)
• Need to learn some new skills?

If you dig a little, you’ll find the uncomfortable questions you have to ask yourself in order to build a better business in 2012.

Now For The Visionary Part

The above are designed to fix the broken things that are bleeding you of energy, desire or money.

The next step involves something bigger.

Your vision for your own future.

I don’t have pithy bullets for this subject, and I will say this is the hard part.

You need to look ahead a few years and decide what it is you want to be doing. An obvious analogy is construction; pounding nails is fine when you’re 25, but it can be a hard life when you’re 50.

Shouldn’t you own the construction company by then?

Accordingly, what are you doing in 2012 to make 2013 — and all the years after it — better?

Do you need to find better-paying clients/projects/niches? Is it time to wholly overhaul your business, aiming in it a new, more profitable direction?

A Hot Tip

If your answers to the above questions suggest change is in order, don’t trot out the usual fluffy, non-specific resolutions.

“I will be more productive during the day” is not a good goal.

“I will not turn on the TV” or “I will buy Freedom and use it at least four hours every day” are more specific solutions to real problems, and easier to measure.

Finally, be honest and even a little courageous.

This stuff isn’t easy (change never is), but it’s essential if you want to prosper over the course of an entire career.

Even if you love what you do, is there a way to do it for more money? Or a way to find more free time (this is about being happy, not just rich)?

Root around in the reptilian parts of your brain a little, and see what pops up (I’ll bet you already know what needs to be done).

Keep writing in 2012, Tom Chandler

In 1979, William Safire wrote a list of grammar rules, skillfully invoking the error in the rule itself (not an easy feat). Here are the first twenty; you can see the rest by clicking here.

1. Remember to never split an infinitive.
2. A preposition is something never to end a sentence with.
3. The passive voice should never be used.
4. Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read.
5. Don’t use no double negatives.
6. Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn’t.
7. Reserve the apostrophe for it’s proper use and omit it when its not needed.
8. Do not put statements in the negative form.
9. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
12. Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
13. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
14. A writer must not shift your point of view.
15. Eschew dialect, irregardless.
16. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
17. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!!
18. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
19. Hyphenate between sy-llables and avoid un-necessary hyphens.
20. Write all adverbial forms correct.

(Read the rest of the rules at Letters of Note).

If I had the time (a face-saving way of saying I don’t have the talent), I’d write a new set of Fumblerules for bloggers (“Avoid communicating massively hyper-awesomeness in each and every mind-blowing sentence.”)

Keep writing, Tom Chandler

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