[MR] Communicating Via The Written Word, was A&S Judging

[David Ritterskamp]

Marsali:
 
It boils down to a couple of points which I am planning to expand into a University class titled How To Communicate Via Email and the Written Word.
 
Ok, now that everybody's done laughing...  :)
 
1.  By and large, people don't know how to write, just like they don't know how to be honest without being confrontational.  I can't imagine that any A&S judge actually writes commentary with the deliberate intent of being cruel.  
 
2.  Likewise, without the emotional tone of the words, people are prone to read the written word with an eye towards the worst possible interpretation.  Studies have shown that about half the time, the reader sees negative emotional content in the words that simply isn't there.  The other half of the time is what you don't read about or hear about.
 
3.  (and this is probably the most important point) Have you noticed the replies talking about how brave people are when they're safely behind a keyboard or other "anonymity", so they feel they can post nasty things and not suffer for it?  There may be an element of truth to that, but again, look at the original *assumption* that the people sending these nasty things are just plain BAD PEOPLE at heart.  "I see this person posting that comment (which I perceive in a negative way) and I make the following negative assumption about this person."  
If people were really SOB's on that scale, would we continue to associate with each other?  I think not.  There'd be guns and knives and etc.  constantly.
 
For example, people make the same sort of assumptions when you read emails from somebody who can't type and whose grammar is crap.  Ef Ah cant type reel gud yiu ashume im a dummy dont u?  I do it all the time.  Turns out most of them aren't dumb; they just can't type or spell or choose their words or whatever.  But the assumption gets made, doesn't it?  And it stays that way until you meet whoever it is in person and discover they really aren't that dumb.
 
What *I* think an email, ANY email, boils down to is the simple fact that WE ALL WANT TO BE RIGHT.  And more importantly, WE WANT OTHER PEOPLE TO SEE US BEING RIGHT.  So we respond to the email on our local newgroup and send it off thinking "ooh, goody, I get to be right, and everybody gets to see me being right, and that's major Cool Points!"  We send FYI emails about events, we send neat links, we volunteer information, etc etc etc, not just because we want to be helpful but because we want to be seen being right.  And email is a great medium for being seen to be right, because so many of us read it.
 
One of the reasons I think this is because as the moderator for the Sacred Stone e-list I've had to put people on moderated status before.  WITHOUT EXCEPTION, every time I've done it, the problem has DISAPPEARED.  Why?  Because whoever was sending the emails realized that they weren't going to get to be seen being RIGHTEOUSLY RIGHT any more, and they gave up.  
 
Don't get the wrong idea about me though; I'm not pointing fingers and claiming I'm lily-pure by any stretch of the imagination.  One of the things I'll show in my class is two emails I have sent out in the past.  One was misinterpreted to mean something cruel it didn't, and the other was correctly interpreted to mean every vicious word I wrote.  And when I got jumped for being "nasty on email" I replied that I meant every word, which pretty much gave the accusers nowhere to go.  Why?  Because they didn't get to be RIGHTEOUSLY RIGHT any more.  So that whole line of accusation petered out almost instantly.
So, to conclude; yes.  There's no doubt in my mind that there are people that need to learn how to communicate via the written word, be it email, a judging form, or what have you.  The corollary to that, however, is that people also need to learn how to read without reading emotional content into what they're saying.  Unless somebody knows something I don't, as I said, I can't imagine any A&S judge ever deliberately being cruel on a judging form.  I choose to believe that they aren't deliberately evil; they just don't know how to communicate, and the readers just don't know how to redact the emotional content of what they read.  This is not to say that writers of evil don't exist; I've been one.  But I try never to be a writer of evil unless I feel that what I'm reading leaves absolutely no doubt as to its intent.
 
Regards,
 
Jonathan Blackbow
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.-Niccolo M.> Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 05:35:02 -0700> From: ladymarsaili at yahoo.com> To: atlantia at atlantia.sca.org> Subject: [MR] A&S Judging Question Part Two>  > However, from some of the off-list responses, this leads to a second question: Why do some of the judges (who seldom, if ever, sign their comments!) feel that they need to be as nasty as possible and tear down the item submitted, as well as the person doing it? While I get far more positive critique than negative, the negative has made me want to say, "Well, I'm never subjecting myself to THIS again!" I know I'm not the only that feels that way from comments from other people!> > Is it because that person has suddenly found themselves faced with judging things they know nothing about? Example, Lady Whosis is an Expert in Old Swedish Viking Snarfleblatts -- and proud of it, because there's not many people that know about them! -- she agrees to judge an A&S competition and is faced with an Elizabethan Pincushion. She knows nothing about this inferior art form, so feels the need to let the benighted being that presented this, know what a lesser life form they are and what a dreadful thing this is they've done.> > Or Lord Whatsis is an Expert in Elizabethan Pincushions and the one being displayed is not up to His Level of Perfection, so he must demolish it (and the character of the person that made it.)> > Marsali Johnston> > __________________________________________________> Do You Yahoo!?> Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com 
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