The medium of these forums is mostly words. Sometimes pictures, sometimes videos, but most of the information exchange happens with typed words with a limited amount of accents (bold face, italics, color, underline, size, capitalization)
However most people write in a conversational rather than academic tone. But you can't really hear the intonations, read the body language, see the gestures and facial expressions that you usually would with a conversation.
There's no pacing of expression, pausing for effect, there's nothing other than my words. Which means there's a -- v a s t -- divide between what I've intended when I write and what you infer from my writings.
hmmm....that was personal...could have been said:
there's vast difference between what an author intends with his/her writings and what the reader infers from writing.
Even that language gives us a model. The author puts in meaning then the read must decode and extract meaning. And somewhere in that process good things and bad things seem to happen. The vast majority of the discussion that goes on these boards is good, thoughful, informative, fun, repartee. A very little bit is misunderstood, mean-spirited, and the kind of thing I think folks should talk about one on one before they post it in open forum.
That's my opinion and folks can and will differ with me. However I am constantly...surprised...shocked...dismayed...by the level of emotional highjacking that seems to happen with just words.
Just words.
I guess my question is: why isn't more effort made to request clarification of someone's meaning before strong language is introduced. Why not just ask first instead of assuming that your inference is 100% correctly in line with what the author intended?