On 3/26/03 15:32, Lee Larson wrote
>On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 01:03 PM, Ronald Broadwater wrote: > >> I am not familiar with internet discussions other than this group. I am >> amazed at the carelessness of the dialogue. I could never talk with an >> acquaintance with the tone and egging on that has occurred here. It >> has the emotion of a prelude to a fist fight. > >One thing I've learned is that you have to choose your words very >carefully in e-mail -- much more carefully than in face-to-face >conversation -- because a friendly face takes a lot of the sting off >strong language. It's very easy to rub someone the wrong way with >e-mail, and it happens for the strangest reasons. For example, I enjoy >having fun with words, but several people have written me off-list >saying things like "I don't want to go to a thesaurus everytime and >look up the meaning of a word." or "Why do you rub your education in >our faces by showing off your vocabulary?" > Like Lee sez, it actually is possible to offend someone via email even when trying to be friendly. Here's something that happened to me: A student in a distance education computer class asked how to copy a formula from a cell in a spreadsheet and paste it into another document, since simply copying and pasting would paste the value rather than the formula. I wanted to say "read the homework problem, it tells you the explicit steps right there", but I tried to be nice, and approach it the way that I would if he were sitting in my office, and said "Here's a hint: how would you copy and paste between two word processing documents?" His response: "Here's a hint: I don't like your attitude." Pretty odd, but it sure made me be really careful about choosing words in emails. Bill | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be March 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
