(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

I need to change how I handle misreadings of my occasional controversial statements. It's not realistic to expect every online visitor to read carefully; such is the nature of the net. Strawmen - clumsy or deliberate misreadings - are a huge red button for me; the injustice of being accused of saying something I didn't galls me. But if my goal is to communicate, then I can't just grumpily insist people read what I actually wrote and avoid jumping to conclusions; I'll have to be prepared to patiently explain myself. (Mind you, I did have one visitor who was concocting amazing lies; there's no point in trying to explain anything to someone like that.)

ETA: And an opportunity to try this approach appears almost at once...

Comments

[big-n-happy.livejournal.com]

http://www.tvo.org/theagenda/video/TAWSPfull051007.swf

I found that interview I was rambling about on your journal that one time.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Oh, ta!

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Velly intellesting... Thankyou. =:o}

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

This is a good thing to have realised. [NODS]

One of the things about making concise, precise and accurate satatments, is that most people have little or no experience of how to recognise or interpret concise, precise and accurate statements.

It's worth bearing in mind that data redundancy - whether in speach, text, or other types of datastream - is a very useful aid to disambiguation and error detection. Or, indeed, to spotting when the speaker is just babbling incoherently. =:o} Consequently, people use it a lot; and consequently people expect a certain proportion of what they read or hear to be redundant data. The significance of a single word, or of the exact positioning of a word (or punctuation mark) can easily be overlooked. Parsing a text that has no redundacy requires that the reader make no slips whatsoever - and that's hard work.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

It's the ghastly truth, Mr Data.