# The letter you've been putting off Disputing a charge, canceling something that resists canceling, saying no to someone you'll see again. **Time:** 20 minutes **What you'll have when you're done:** A sent message, and a method you can reuse the next time one of these turns up. **Before you start:** - Any AI chat tool. A free tier is enough. If you're doing this on a work account, check your employer's policy first - The facts: dates, amounts, what was said, what you want to happen - Any reference numbers, which you'll need at the end but not at the start ---Everyone has one. The charge you meant to dispute in March. The subscription with no cancel button. The invitation you need to decline without causing offense. The neighbor, the landlord, the school, the insurer. The reason it's still on the list usually isn't that it's hard. It's that the first sentence is hard, and the tone is hard, and you're a bit annoyed, and starting means deciding how annoyed to sound. That's the part to hand over. You supply the facts and what you want. It supplies the structure and the register. Everything needed to do the job is in what you paste, which puts it in the left column of the strong/weak table, and it's why this works when so many other things don't. --- ## Before you start: what to leave out You're describing a situation involving you and usually one other person or company. Take out what identifies you: - Your full name, address, phone number, email - Account numbers, policy numbers, order numbers, case references - Card and bank details - Anything about your health, unless it's the subject of the message, in which case describe it in general terms Use placeholders: `[MY NAME]`, `[ACCOUNT]`, `[DATE]`. Fill them in at the end, in your own email client, before you send. Keep the company name. Take out the name of any individual person and call them `[THE MANAGER]` or `[MY NEIGHBOR]`. The situation is what you're working on. The identities aren't. --- ## Task 1: say what happened, badly **About five minutes.** Don't write the letter yet. Write the facts, in any order, in whatever tone you actually feel. ``` I need to write to [company / person] about the following. [Everything you know. Dates, amounts, what was said, what was promised, what happened instead. Don't organize it. Don't be fair. Bullet points, half-sentences, whatever comes out.] What I want to happen: [the outcome, stated plainly] Don't write anything yet. Read this back to me as a numbered sequence of events, in order, with only what I actually told you. Mark anything where I've given you an opinion rather than a fact. Mark anything a reader would need that I haven't told you. ``` That last paragraph is doing the work. What comes back is your own account, sorted, with the gaps flagged. What will happen: a timeline, plus two or three things you left out. Usually a date, usually the exact wording of what somebody promised. **What you've learned:** most of the difficulty was that the facts were unordered in your head, not that the letter was hard to write. --- ## Task 2: three versions, three temperatures **About ten minutes.** Now the drafting, and the useful part is asking for more than one. ``` Now draft this message. Give me three versions: 1. Assuming good faith. This was an error and they'll want to fix it. 2. Firm. This has gone on long enough and I expect it resolved. 3. Formal. Setting up a paper trail, on the assumption this escalates. Same facts in all three. Under 200 words each. No pleading, no threats, no sarcasm. End each one with the specific thing I want them to do and a date. ``` Three versions rather than one, because the useful question isn't "what should I write" but "how hard do I want to push," and that's much easier to answer by looking at the options than in the abstract. What will happen: three drafts. Usually you'll want the second one's opening and the first one's closing. That's fine. Take the pieces. **What you've learned:** tone is a dial you get to set, not a thing that happens to you because you were annoyed when you started typing. --- ## Task 3: read it back to me cold **About five minutes.** Before you send, one more pass. ``` Here's the version I'm going to send: [paste it] Read it as the person receiving it. They have forty messages today and this is one of them. What's the first thing they'll do with it? What could they misread? What's the easiest way for them to say no or do nothing? Is what I'm asking for clear enough to action without replying to ask me a question? Don't rewrite it. Tell me what you notice. ``` Asking it to read rather than rewrite matters. Ask for improvements and you'll get changes, because you asked for changes. Ask what a reader would notice and you get the two things that are genuinely unclear. What will happen: usually one real catch. Most often that your actual request is buried in the middle where a busy person won't see it. **What you've learned:** the message is written for someone in a hurry who doesn't care about this as much as you do. Everything else follows from that. --- ## When it breaks **It doesn't know your rights.** Consumer protection, tenancy rules, refund windows, and cooling-off periods vary by country and by state, and it will state them confidently and wrongly. Never let it cite a law or a right in your letter unless you've checked it yourself. Describing what happened is safe. Asserting what you're entitled to is not. **It's worst on anything recent.** A policy that changed this year, a company that renamed its plans, a rule that took effect last month. Old and stable is safer ground. **It softens by default.** Left alone it hedges, apologizes for the intrusion, and buries the ask. Task 2 names the temperature for exactly this reason. If a draft comes back mushy, say "less apologetic, same facts" and it will fix it. **It invents specifics.** Reference numbers, dates, amounts, the wording of a policy. Anything specific in the draft that you didn't supply is unverified. Read the final version against your own timeline from task 1 before it goes. **Long threads drift.** If you've been going back and forth for a while, it starts dropping constraints you set at the beginning. Paste the final version fresh and ask it to check that, rather than trusting the twentieth message in a chain. --- ## What this doesn't tell you It doesn't tell you whether you're right. It helps you say the thing clearly, which is a different service, and it will help you say a weak case clearly too. It also doesn't know the person you're writing to. You do. If something reads correctly but doesn't sound like it will land with them, trust yourself and change it. You're the one who has to see them at the school gate. And for anything with real money attached, or where you're being threatened with something, this is preparation rather than a substitute. A clear timeline and a clear ask make an hour with someone who knows the law go a great deal further.