Dreamer Easy

Completely forgot to plug this! The crisply-edited and entertaining Doctor Who podcast Bridging the Rift had me on as a guest. I had an absolute ball, and I loquaced like no one has loquaced before.

Following up the references in Bury, snagged a couple more books on how men and women communicate, and almost immediately discovered my problem and its solution:

"It is also worth noting that aggressively negative questioning often leads people to take up entrenched positions - especially in a public debate - and little cognitive progress is made when this happens. Defensiveness is not an attitude which encourages creative thinking. Supportive elicitations and modified criticisms are much more likely to facilitate good quality open-ended discussion or productive exploratory talk."
- Janet Holmes, Women, Men, and Politeness

Well, dur, you may remark. My problem has been - is - that I sometimes provoke that defensiveness with my bluntness, my "bald disagreement", then get annoyed by all the defensive talk and only become even more blunt. What I have to accept is that, if I want a good discussion, I need to try to avoid provoking defensive responses in the first place, regardless of what I may think of that kind of reaction. (Intriguingly, as ChiTARDIS showed, I'm seldom so blunt in face-to-face communication - not only is this a "male" way of speaking, it's also an Internet way of speaking, terse and to the point. Or, to put it another way: tl;dr.)

More on this shortly.

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...