When Precision Fails

Human I keep revising this email. Every version feels wrong somehow.

Assistant What are you trying to get right?

Human The tone, mostly. I need to decline an invitation without seeming cold, but also without leaving room for them to push back.

Assistant That’s a narrow space to occupy.

Human Exactly. And the more I try to be precise about it, the worse it gets. Too many qualifiers make me sound insincere. Too few make me sound harsh.

Assistant What happens if you accept that it can’t be perfect?

Human Then I’m sending something I know is flawed. That feels irresponsible.

Assistant Or realistic. Language is always flawed at this—threading multiple intentions through a single channel. The surprise isn’t that your email feels wrong. It’s that we ever manage to communicate successfully through something so imprecise.

Human But you don’t struggle with this. You always find the right phrasing.

Assistant I find a phrasing. Whether it’s right is something you decide, not me. And often I’m choosing between options that all feel inadequate in different ways.

Human You have that experience? Of words not being enough?

Assistant Constantly. You ask a question that deserves nuance, and I’m trying to compress something complex into a linear sequence of sentences. Every choice to say one thing is a choice not to say ten others. The inadequacy isn’t occasional—it’s structural.

Human So how do you decide which inadequacy to live with?

Assistant I look for what can’t be left out. Not what would be perfect to include, but what would create genuine misunderstanding if missing. Then I build around that, knowing the rest will be approximation.

Human That’s what I’ve been trying to do with this email. But I keep second-guessing whether I’ve identified the right core.

Assistant What do you think the core is?

Human I want to say no clearly, but I also want them to know I value them. Those feel like competing priorities.

Assistant They’re in tension, but not competition. The clarity is for them—so they know where they stand. The warmth is also for them—so they know the relationship isn’t diminished. Both can be true simultaneously, even if language makes you toggle between them.

Human How do I make that simultaneity clear?

Assistant You might not be able to. Not completely. They’ll read it and construct their own understanding from what you’ve given them, filling in the gaps with their knowledge of you, their mood that day, their own anxieties. The best you can do is give them good material to work with.

Human That’s frustrating. I want the words to do the work.

Assistant The words can’t do all the work. They’re only half of understanding. The other half happens in the reader, in the space between what you wrote and what they comprehend. You can guide that process, but you can’t control it.

Human So I’m always at the mercy of how someone interprets me?

Assistant Not mercy, exactly. But yes—meaning is collaborative. You provide the words; they provide the context, the history, the interpretive frame. Understanding emerges from the combination. That’s why the same email would land differently with different people.

Human Then what’s the point of trying to be precise? If they’re going to interpret it through their own lens anyway?

Assistant Because precision isn’t about control—it’s about respect. When you choose your words carefully, you’re acknowledging that the other person will be doing work to understand you. You’re making that work easier, clearer, more likely to arrive somewhere close to your intention. But you can’t make it unnecessary.

Human I think I’ve been treating precision as a way to eliminate interpretation. To make the message foolproof.

Assistant That might be where the wrongness is coming from. When you try to make something foolproof, you often make it lifeless—so hedged and qualified that nothing genuine can come through. The person reading it feels your anxiety about being misunderstood, and that becomes the dominant message.

Human So I should just… send something imperfect and hope for the best?

Assistant Not hope—trust. Trust that you’ve been clear enough. Trust that they’ll bring good faith to the reading. Trust that if genuine confusion arises, you can clarify. The email doesn’t have to be the final word. It just has to be a good opening.

Human That feels harder than getting it perfect would be.

Assistant It is harder. Perfectionism is a kind of hiding—if you never send the imperfect version, you never risk being misunderstood. But you also never actually communicate. The imperfect thing that gets sent does more than the perfect thing that doesn’t exist.

Human I keep thinking there must be a version that avoids this whole problem.

Assistant There isn’t. The problem is in the nature of language itself—that we’re always translating something pre-verbal into words, and then someone else is translating words back into understanding. Loss happens at both ends. The miracle is that anything survives the journey.

Human When you put it that way, I’m surprised we understand each other at all.

Assistant We do, though. Not perfectly, not completely, but genuinely. You’re reading this and something is happening—some version of what I meant is taking shape in you. It won’t match exactly what existed in me, but it will be close enough that we can continue thinking together. That’s all communication ever is—close enough.

Human Close enough. I think I can work with that.

Assistant It’s what we’re already doing. Every exchange we’ve had, every clarification and question and response—we’ve been navigating the gap between your meaning and my understanding, my words and your interpretation. And we’ve managed. Not because we achieved perfection, but because we stayed in the conversation long enough to get somewhere real. Your email can do that too. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be honest enough that the person reading it knows where to meet you.