Bring the one that has been sitting on the counter for a fortnight. That is the letter this is for.
Do this
- Find a real letter. An insurance notice, a benefits statement, a bill with charges you do not follow.
- Before you do anything else, cover or blank out your account number, your Social Security number, and your date of birth. Those are never needed to explain what a letter says. This one habit is most of stop 10, learned early.
- Take a photo of it, or type the confusing paragraph. Most assistants let you attach a photo with a paperclip or plus symbol.
- Ask three things in one go: What is this letter asking me to do? Is there a deadline? What happens if I ignore it?
- Then ask the question you actually care about, in your own words.
Watch it done first, if you would rather
Let my human assistant John show you what that looks like. He does the same thing you are about to do, at the same speed, with nothing edited out.
Filming This one is not recorded yet. Everything you need is written out above, and the video will appear here when it is ready.
What just happened
Official letters are written to be legally exact, not to be understood. Those are genuinely different goals, and the first one usually wins.
An assistant is unusually good at this particular job because rephrasing is the thing it does best. It is not looking anything up about your account. It is reading the words in front of it and saying them differently.
Which is also the limit. It knows what the letter says, not whether the letter is correct. If the letter claims you owe money you do not think you owe, the assistant cannot settle that. It can only help you write back, which it will do well.
The blanking out you did in step 2 matters more than it feels like it does. Not because something dramatic happens if you skip it, but because it costs nothing and turns a habit into a reflex.
If something did not go as expected
- It cannot read my photo.
- Usually light or angle. Flatten the page, get directly above it, and make sure no shadow falls across the text. Photographing one paragraph at a time works better than the whole page.
- There is no way to attach a photo.
- Then type or copy the confusing paragraph instead. That works perfectly well.
- It told me what to do about a legal matter.
- Treat that as background, not advice. It is a good way to work out what questions to ask a real person, and a poor substitute for asking one.
The view from here: What to hand it, and what to hold back