Think twice --- post once

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KMaurer

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Once upon a time, people either wrote letters or talked, usually face to face. When writing letters, people tended to take a lot of time editing and revising, particularly when writing to someone they didn't know well. Conversation, on the other hand, neither allow for nor require that sort of care (even though it's still a good idea to keep you mind at least one step ahead of your mouth).

One of the major problems of E-mail and BB's such as this, is that the high speed interactive nature often resembles a conversation more closely than it does letter writing. Here's where a lot of problems start. In a conversation, the tone of your voice usually conveys a lot of information about the meaning or intent of your words. When face to face, body language and facial expressions convey even more information and context. All of this is totally missing in E-Mail and BB's. Emoticons, beginning with simple things like <G>, came about as an attempt to address this problem, but they're still woefully inadequate.

Unless you know all the potential readers of a post very well (particularly the person to whom you may be responding), they may not fully appreciate your great sense of wit and your clever use of irony, ambiguity or allusions.

Before you submit a post, please stop, take a deep breath and read what you have actually typed --- not what you meant, not what you want the reader to infer, but the literal words there on the screen. If there's some way, any way, that a person less versed in creative writing might miss your point, or more importantly, might take it the wrong way, please go back and try it again in simpler, more precise language. Remember, you don't have body language or the tone of your voice to help convey your message; you have to rely 100% on the words themselves.

Think twice --- post once
 
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