The Three Judgements a Single Automatic Reply Carries, and How to Settle Them

You finish building the enquiry form, sit down to write the automatic reply, and the hand stops. In most cases what gets searched for at that point is a sample automatic reply email. Out-of-office notices for a holiday, thanks for a purchase, delivery of a document. Samples are lined up by use, and dropping one in completes the message.

It completes, so the work ends there. Having ended, the reason you could not write it never comes back to the surface.

The automatic reply is among the smallest pieces of automation in a business. The moment a form is submitted, one message leaves without a human hand. That is the whole mechanism. Yet this smallest mechanism has exactly the property of large automation. What the machine takes over is not the judgement itself but the point at which the judgement is passed. You stop having to think at each submission because everything was settled before the submission.

So what has not been settled cannot be automated. Automate without settling and it is the unsettledness that gets fixed in place, on the machine’s side.

Let me separate up front what gets settled here from what does not. Three things get settled. First, what the word automation is actually doing. Second, what is occurring when the wording turns hollow. Third, how many judgements a single automatic reply carries, and which ones.

One thing does not get settled. How many days your own reply deadline should run to is not decided here. The deadline fixes itself once what a reply contains has been settled, so the deciding is work outside the wording. What can be handed over here reaches as far as the material for reading whether it has been settled.

The place where the loss falls is hard to see as well. A vague automatic reply does not present as a fault. The send succeeds, the message arrives, and your own labour has genuinely gone down. Only the sense of reduced labour remains, so what got fixed in place never rises into observation. And what does not rise into observation never gets corrected.

Moreover, that fixing puts a cost on the other side. Someone receiving a message with no deadline written in it has to decide for themselves whether to wait or look elsewhere. The material for deciding sits with you; the one made to decide is them. Nor is the fact that you have not decided visible from their side. Which way that decision fell never once appears in your own records. What follows is arranged not as a route to polishing the wording but as a route to reading what this one message is settling.

What lines up as advice on writing the automatic reply is the order of subject line and body

The method presented is organised as a procedure for writing. At its centre stands the order in which subject line and body are assembled.

An automatic reply is a mechanism by which prepared wording is sent automatically, triggered by an action on the other side such as submitting an enquiry form or completing a purchase. It also goes by thank-you mail or auto-response mail.

Four uses are typically presented. Confirming that an enquiry was received. Thanks for a purchase or application. Notice of an extended holiday or absence. Delivery of a document or a bonus. Many articles supply sample wording for each.

What is set out as the method of writing is the assembly of subject line and body. Put a word of thanks at the head of the subject line. State receipt at the top of the body. Follow with what happens next, and close with a signature and contact details.

The importance of timing is also common to these accounts. Arrival immediately after the other party acts carries meaning, and an interval weakens the effect.

For out-of-office notices, stating the period and an alternative contact is stressed. Until when will you be unable to reply, and whom should the sender approach if it is urgent. Missing either leaves the recipient unable to move.

On setup, the accounts explain that form builders and mail delivery services carry the function as standard. Register a template once and the rest is sent automatically. No difficult configuration is required.

Nothing in this set is factually wrong. Subject lines that state the business do get read more; an out-of-office notice does need a period and an alternative contact, which is an obvious requirement from the recipient’s side. That samples are widely shared has certainly lowered the cost of starting.

Set that alongside, and the premise the whole account rests on comes out. The automatic reply is being treated as a matter of wording. What to write, how to write it. The matter is organised as a problem of writing skill.

None of which says the treatment is off the mark. What goes out is wording, and poor wording does not land. There is ample reason to treat it as a matter of skill.

Organising it entirely as a matter of wording makes, in turn, every reason you cannot write look like not knowing how to write. Going off to find samples comes out of exactly there.

And drop a sample in and it writes itself. Because it writes itself, the work stops there. Where the cause was not writing skill, that cause stays behind the wording and does not surface at the next enquiry either.

Automation has not removed the judgement. It has moved the point at which it is passed

Automation is the forward shift of judgements previously passed at each execution, gathered into the moment of design. The total quantity of judgement does not fall. Only the point of passing moves.

This structure has support from psychology. Gollwitzer divided intention into two (Gollwitzer, 1999, American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503). One settles the state to be reached, taking the form I will achieve this. The other settles in advance when, where and how one will act toward that achievement, taking the form when this situation arises, I will take this action.

What happens when the latter is settled in advance. Gollwitzer states that control of the action passes from will in the moment to the situational cue specified beforehand. When the situation actually arrives, the settled action is drawn out automatically. The judgement did not vanish; the bearer of the judgement changed to the situational cue.

There is measurement too. In an experiment asking participants to write and send a report on how they spent Christmas Eve within forty-eight hours, three quarters of the group that specified in advance when and where they would write submitted within the deadline. In the group that did not specify, it was one third.

What matters is where that difference comes from. Not writing skill. Not the will to write. What produced the difference was solely whether when and where had been settled beforehand.

Transposed to the automatic reply: no human hand is required at the moment of submission because no judgement arises at that moment. No judgement arises because what to convey on receipt, what to return by when, and how it proceeds afterwards were all settled beforehand.

An automatic reply may read as merely a routine notice and contains nothing worth calling judgement. It contains one. Whether you can write a reply within three business days is a statement about whether you hold a footing that returns within three business days. The instant it is written, it becomes a deadline against yourself.

The judgement looks light only where it has been settled. Settled, it takes an instant to write, and after writing it you stop having to think. Lightness is the result of having finished deciding, not its cause.

And the definition carries its own limit. What can be shifted forward is only what has finished being decided. Put something unfinished through the forward shift and what gets shifted is not the judgement but the absence of one.

Hollow wording is not a shortfall in writing skill. It is unsettledness showing through

Wording in an automatic reply turns hollow not because of the writer’s skill. What has not been settled at that point is appearing as a blank in the wording.

The plain case is for now. Writing for now, this is to confirm receipt, the writer has not written a deadline. It goes unwritten not from unwillingness but because when a reply can be returned has not been settled.

The second case is a member of staff will be in touch shortly. When shortly is goes unwritten. Who the staff member is goes unwritten too. Running a business alone, the staff member can only be yourself, yet that is rarely how it reads.

Both tend to be flagged as defects of prose. Vague, impersonal. But correct the phrasing and the state of not having settled does not move.

You can strike for now and write a reply within three business days instead. The instant you do, though, it stops being a correction of prose. You have just now settled a deadline of three business days.

Which is to say: the work of correcting the wording is not writing work but deciding work. Settle it and the wording fixes itself; leave it unsettled and no number of rewrites removes the vagueness.

Not every hollowness comes from unsettledness. Some wording merely strings together set phrases; some is so polite the information thins out. Those are genuinely problems of prose.

The test is simple. Try to rewrite the line concretely and see whether the rewriting requires settling something. If it does, that is unsettledness. If it does not, it is a matter of expression.

Hold this view and the automatic reply becomes an instrument of diagnosis. How many vague spots sit inside one message very nearly matches the count of what the business has yet to settle.

And that diagnosis works only on yourself. You can count the vague spots, but what ought to be settled differs with the content of the business. What to settle cannot be handed in from outside. What can be handed over is the reading by which vagueness is unsettledness showing through.

Change the reading and the order of correction changes. Treated as a problem of prose, correction is the polishing of wording. Treated as unsettledness showing through, correction is a decision on the business side. Before the same single line, the file you open is different. And entering from the decision, the corrected wording is done in one pass. Entering from the polish, it can be rewritten indefinitely for as long as nothing is settled.

The judgements a single message carries divide into three

The judgements an automatic reply actually carries divide into three: confirmation, statement, and specification.

The first is confirmation of arrival. After the other party presses send, whether it arrived is unknowable from their side. The one confirming message goes out to close that uncertainty.

This looks like a formal function, and it is not. When no confirmation comes, the sender cannot separate it may not have gone through from it arrived and is being ignored. In the first case they resend; in the second they give up. The state in which neither can be settled is the state in which they can least act.

The second is a statement of what happens next. Who reads it, when a reply comes, how it proceeds after. Given that statement, the sender can fit the next action into a schedule.

What has to be settled here is the order. Is there anything to verify before replying. Is the reply an answer to a question or a proposal of dates. With the order unsettled, all you can write is we will be in touch shortly.

The third is a specification of how the waiting side uses their time. With a deadline written, the sender can wait without approaching anyone else until it passes. Without one, whether to wait or look elsewhere becomes their own decision. The one holding no material for the decision is the sender, so in most cases it falls to the side of looking elsewhere.

Which is to say: choosing not to write a deadline is choosing to push a judgement onto the other party. And the side it is pushed onto tends to fall the way that disadvantages you. That is the sense in which not writing is not neutral.

It might read as safer to keep it vague, since stating a deadline creates trouble when it is missed. Nothing here says to write a deadline you cannot keep. Write one you can. If three business days is not returnable, a week suffices.

The safety of vagueness is safety on your own side. From the other side it is nothing but a gap in the material for judgement. Extending a deadline and omitting a deadline are wholly different choices.

Among the three, the first alone does not depend on the content of the business. Conveying arrival has the same shape whatever field you work in. The second and third change with what the reply contains. Which means the first is the only one automatable at the outset; the rest get added once settled.

The deadline will not settle because the word reply points at two different jobs

Of the three, the third, the deadline, cannot be written until what a reply contains has been settled. When a deadline will not settle, that is in most cases where it is stuck.

Define the reply to an enquiry as hearing out the other party’s circumstances and returning a proposal you have assembled, and the deadline runs long. The time to assemble it cannot be read. Define the reply as returning the questions needed to hear them out, and the deadline runs short. The question items can be settled beforehand.

The same word reply is pointing at two wholly different jobs. Which one it points at has not been settled, so the deadline cannot be settled either.

What works is dividing the reply into stages. What comes back in the first message, and what in the second. Divided into stages, the deadline of the first stage settles short and settles firmly.

Concretely, confine the first message to confirmation of receipt, and a statement of what you want to hear. With that content, nearly the whole text can be written beforehand. What varies per sender is only which of the question items get used.

And being writable beforehand is being automatable. The range of the automatic reply is settled exactly this way. The range of automation is whatever was settled first, rather than a range settled first and filled in after.

This division works only where the items to be heard out can be enumerated beforehand. In some fields, what needs asking in the first exchange varies greatly by sender. There, standardising the first message sends an off-target set of questions to everyone.

In that case, confine the first message to confirmation and deadline. A person writes the questions. Narrowing the range of automation is itself one of the things to be decided.

Dividing into stages increases the number of exchanges. What took one round may take two. More rounds is not necessarily a loss; more exchanges also means more points of contact. But unless each added round means something, the labour has simply grown. When dividing into stages, the test is whether you can say what each stage is for.

Dividing brings a second thing to the surface. Try to write the first message through and you end up listing every item you need to ask about. Listed, several of them turn out to be things you did not need to ask at all — already published, or conditions you ought to have settled first. The list of items to ask is at the same time a list of conditions you have not settled. Undivided, that list never gets made.

This one automatic reply is settling how the other person uses their time

Take the automatic reply as a mechanism for reducing your own labour and something drops out of view. This one message is regulating how the other side uses their time.

Waiting carries a cost: the cost of holding other options in abeyance rather than approaching them. And the size of that cost is settled less by the length of the wait than by whether the wait can be read.

Three days known to be three days and three days of unknown length are not the same length. In the first, other plans can be arranged; in the second they cannot. A wait that cannot be read occupies the room for judgement continuously, for its whole duration.

So stating a deadline is, before it is any expression of good faith on your part, an operation returning the other person’s time. The instant within three business days is written, those three days become theirs to use.

Meaning arises here from the business side as well. Whether others get approached during the wait changes with whether a deadline was written. Write one and the enquiry is at least held open until then.

But place that as the effect and the order reverses. A deadline is not written in order to hold them. Holding occurs as a result of returning their time.

With the order reversed, the deadline you write changes. If holding becomes the aim, you want the deadline long, because it holds longer. Where returning their time is the aim, the deadline is written as short as you can actually return within. The same single line gets designed in opposite directions by the order of the aim.

There are many cases where conveying arrival is enough without thinking this finely. Where the enquiry is simple, the reply is fast, and the other party is not in a hurry, one line of confirmation suffices.

It stops sufficing once the waiting runs long. As the business moves and enquiries multiply, the interval to reply tends to lengthen. Only when it lengthens does the cost of the missing deadline come to the surface. And by then, whoever could not wait has already gone.

The value of settling it beforehand lies in that lag. The point at which the cost occurs and the point at which it can be observed are out of step.

Write a deadline and that deadline becomes a constraint on the business. Write three business days and you can accept only the volume returnable in three business days. Increasing the volume means either extending the deadline or lightening the reply. Writing a deadline is an operation that reaches into the design of the scale of the business.

The samples carry judgements somebody else passed

There is no problem in principle with using sample wording as it stands. Greeting and signature forms are shared conventions, and rethinking them each time means nothing. Trouble arises where the parts carrying judgement get copied along with the rest.

The line we will reply within three business days, for instance, is not wording but judgement. Three business days happened to suit the business of whoever wrote the sample; nothing guarantees it suits yours. Running alone with other work in hand, three business days may not be keepable.

An automatic reply carrying a deadline you cannot keep produces a worse state than one carrying none. Without it the sender merely holds no material; with it unmet, you have broken a standard you set yourself.

The same thing happens elsewhere. A member of staff is the language of a business with several staff. Copy it into a one-person business and you are performing an organisation that does not exist. The performance is not the problem in itself; the problem is having to build the later handling to match the performed shape.

Out-of-office notices produce the same structure. Holiday samples contain an alternative contact. In an organisation it exists; alone it does not. Strike the non-existent alternative and only the period remains. A notice carrying only the period is the correct shape.

The parts carrying judgement can be told apart. If rewriting the line requires checking a fact, it is judgement. Deadline, staffing, scope, conditions. These four require checking the facts before they can be rewritten, so they count as judgement.

Settling all of the judgement-bearing parts yourself is a burden at first. Settling them means looking at how the business actually runs. At a stage where that grasp is incomplete, some items cannot be settled at all.

There, strike the unsettleable items from the wording. Rather than writing a member of staff will be in touch shortly vaguely, do not write about staffing. Not writing and writing vaguely are different. Written vaguely, what is unsettled looks settled.

Draw the judgements out of the samples and the wording shortens. A short automatic reply can look curt. Curtness is the result of writing only what has been settled. Conveying accurately what has been settled is more usable to the recipient than performing courtesy through length.

Short wording works in a second way. Everything written carries meaning, so a line added later gets read. Add a line to wording padded with set phrases and it gets buried. The length of the wording is also the size of the room you have for saying something next.

Automate without settling and it is the unsettledness that gets fixed

Automate what has not been settled and the state of not having settled is repeated, and fixed.

Unautomated, the unsettledness surfaces every time. At each enquiry you think when can I return this, so what is unsettled rises into awareness. It is tiresome, but the prompt to settle occurs every time.

Automate and that prompt disappears. Vague wording goes out automatically each time, so the occasion for thinking is gone. What is unsettled stabilises in its unsettled state.

This side effect leaves no record. The send succeeds every time, so there is nowhere it gets counted as a fault.

Gollwitzer attaches two qualifications to the effect of settling in advance (same paper). One is that no difference appears for actions that were easy to begin anyway. In the experiment, completion for the easy task ran around eighty per cent, the same regardless of prior specification.

The other is that where the intention toward the destination is weak, settling in advance does not work. Settle only the procedure, and unless what the procedure is for has been settled, it does not function.

The two show the limit of automation directly. Automation works on precisely those places that jammed because judgement was required. And where what that judgement is aimed at has not been settled, there is nothing to shift forward.

So the order runs: what the business hands over gets settled. Then the stages up to handing over get settled. Then what is done by when at each stage gets settled. Only there does the automatable range become fixed.

The reverse is arguable: automate first and you will be forced to settle. That happens sometimes. Noticing an unsettled point only when you try to implement is a common order.

But it holds only where the implementation forces the settling. Drop a sample in and implementation completes, so no forcing occurs. Forcing occurs only where you try to write from blank without the sample. Put as a question of order, it is not automation that prompts the decision but the blank page.

Not every fixed unsettledness is a problem. Items that cause no damage unsettled do exist. What becomes a problem is an item governing the other person’s action getting fixed while unsettled. Deadline and scope fall here; signature format and turn of greeting do not.

Mark the four items of the automatic reply — deadline, owner, scope, conditions — and count them

Whether the automatic reply now going out has been settled reads off three points. The quality of the prose does not enter any of them. What is automated is judgement, so the judgement side is what gets looked at.

The first is to lay out the full text of the current automatic reply and mark every place where rewriting would require settling something. Deadline, staffing, scope, conditions. Places among these four carrying no concrete statement are the unsettled places. Count them and the number of unsettled items in the business comes out directly.

Second, whether the action the recipient takes next can be specified as one. If it can, the next action has been specified. Wait for a reply or fill in the rest of the form, either will do. Settling on one is the condition. Where two or more are possible, the recipient chooses.

The third is to record the interval from sending the automatic reply to actually replying. Does the written deadline match the actual time taken. If it does not, what to correct is the deadline. Continuing to display a deadline that does not match the reality has the same effect as not having settled at all.

The three have limits. All of them work only where an automatic reply is already in operation. At the stage of building one, there is nothing to confirm.

What is available at that stage is to write the four onto a blank page before opening any sample: deadline, staffing, scope, conditions. Fill the four and then look at the samples, and you can tell the judgement-bearing parts from the expressive parts yourself.

Some of the four cannot be settled at the very start of a business. Having unsettleable items is normal. The problem is writing the unsettleable items as though they were settled. An item that cannot be settled is left open rather than written vaguely. A struck item can be added once settled. Struck, you notice when adding it. Written vaguely, it is already there, so you never notice.

There is one item no number can be supplied for from outside. How many days the reply deadline should run to. It is settled by the nature of the work, the volume presently in hand, and the width of time the other party can wait, so copying anyone else’s figure carries no guarantee that it fits. The count of stages and the range of automation stand in the same place.

Automation shifts forward the point at which judgement is passed. Only the point moved; the judgement remains, so what has not been settled cannot be moved forward. Try to move it and a blank appears in the wording. That blank looks like a defect of prose, and its substance is unsettledness. And automation, by repeating the unsettledness, stabilises it.

In the end, there is one thing to do. Before opening any sample, write the four items — deadline, staffing, scope, conditions — onto a blank page. Whichever of the four will not fill is where the business has not settled yet.

The whole picture of automation and where to start is handled in building systems in your business. What to send after the first message is in how to write an email sequence, and the design of the entrance on the receiving side is in landing page structure.