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The internet has made defensive writers of us all

pchiusano.github.io

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Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#31
post #17
post #4

Context is really important in communication. When speaking with someone face to face, you pick up on vocal intonations and body language to give you context to their speech. As well, knowing someone personally gives context to what they are saying. On the internet, you have none of those things, only text. I think we are hitting a wall with our written languages because they can't adequately communicate context. Emo…

I liked this exact comment when I first read it back in 1985. At least now I can upvote it. That's progress.

How about more voting dimensions?

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#32
I've been thinking about that quiet a bit lately. My two random thoughts:

1. I don't think it's strictly bad. More pressure to build coherent and precise arguments is good. It can indeed yield unnecessarily verbose language but I don't think it has to? Inserting qualifiers etc. everywhere is just the most naive way of approaching it, like a newbie programmer using too many nested if statements.

2. We should assume all comments are charitable as well. They are no different, they're just as likely to be misread.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a few sentences about gender equality at my last job for the company blog. Some people didn't like it so they escalated it to the CTO without contacting me. As a result, the editor who approved my piece was super stressed and apologetic. She quit a few months later. I wasn't surprised. They wanted me to add the word "more" to the title of the second point. Which makes sense, but that's literally a one minute…

> Sorry for going behind your back. I didn't realize you were going to find out So really "Sorry you found out I went behind your back".

To be fair, I understand where they are coming from. It's an reaction all marginalized groups share. My version is when white authors write about PoC issues. But I voice my complaints by tweeting at them. ;)

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#34
I find internet writing to be stimulating in its own way precisely because it is a sort of dash-off writing that does not need to be as precise or exact as would be needed if you were seeking to meet professional standards.

To wit, in law, even in formal contexts, lawyers dish off all sorts of slop in legal briefs, etc. but this really is sub-standard lawyering. To do your job right, you need to meet standards of excellence in making sure you have sound analysis, careful factual recitation, and skilled application of law to facts as you make arguments or seek to achieve some other professional writing goal. This is true as well in less formal professional settings such as writing emails/letters to clients. It may not absolutely matter what you say in terms of precision if a client is not likely to pick up the fine points but it really does matter in terms of maintaining a consistent pride in your professional work. Slop is slop and, when people will evaluate you by how well you are representing a client, it is critical not to be slipshod in your writing.

When writing on the internet, in contrast, you of course want to avoid putting out slop there as well but a lot less precision is needed to make your points. If you make a legal point, it is implied by context that you are making a statement that may not be accurate down to the finest level of detail, that you may be simplifying, or generalizing, or simply venting an opinion that the law may or may not support. Law in itself will vary, even greatly, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and this means that much of what you may be saying is really setting forth broad principles while avoiding a specific application to a given case. For these purposes, there is no need to be defensive, not in the slightest. And I certainly try not to be. Am I ever wrong? Of course, on occasion, yes - I have had a doozie or two in my time, perhaps a number of them. But you try to feel secure about such lapses, knowing that we all err occasionally, and try as a whole to conform to an overall solid record of being as accurate and insightful as possible. While you get the occasional harsh attack, for the most part I have found that people will be charitable knowing that you may have spent no more than 10 or 15 minutes trying to address a sometimes complex topic. Better to give people the benefit of your insights if it is an area where you can do so than it is to leave something in the internet conversion that is wrong or off simply hanging out there. That is a great benefit of the internet. Back in the day, you had to dig deep to find out what people with expertise in their field were thinking and access to this was severely limited. The internet has changed all that. There may be a lot of slop out there but there are also many gems that are there for the taking. As writers, we should be ready to share, if not gems, at least our best thoughts on topics where people might find them helpful.

If I were to stray from my professional topics, then maybe I would be more defensive as well. But the author of this piece emphasizes how the internet may hinder academic writing and I see legal writing as at least broadly similar. So, my experience differs pretty markedly.

Just my two cents.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#35
There is another perspective to this, which is to appreciate when others have put forth a well-considered argument, and to sometimes relish in the challenge of anticipating the rebuttals and shoring up leaks in your reasoning. Often I will write something out that is somewhat critical, and then I'll think about where people might attack it, and it ends up with a more measured position. I love David Foster Wallace because he was the king of considering all facets of an argument or idea so thoroughly that you can't tell which side he's on (and neither could he).

I would say that the people with the problem that this article describes are the good ones, and they are outnumbered and drowned out in our society by "loudmouths" who don't obsessively consider their statements and who do present their own thoughts and beliefs as factual and/or morally correct, so I would say please do keep qualifying everything and even promoting that type of "defensive" thinking. (The caveat is: don't cater to trolls and the willfully uncharitable, and you have to decide for yourself whether someone is trolling or genuinely trying to make an argument worth responding to [or both], it's tough these days!)

I often think about qualifications like "I believe that...", "It is my opinion that...", "I think that...". Some people argue that they're not necessary, it's implied and obvious, it makes you seem weak, etc., but I disagree. I see so many conflicts created by people communicating their beliefs as facts, and it's not at all obvious that they acknowledge the viability of other opinions.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#36

One of the common methods people use to attack posts with ideas they don't agree with is to take the prose literally. This is much like the "work to rule" form of protest that unions use, and the "letter of the law" rather than the spirit of it, and of course all those "zero tolerance" policies.

One approach to resolving this would be to not make statements that are literally not true and to correct statements that are literally not true to not be literally not true.

That creates bland writing and the process of correcting every little deviation is so pedantic that it provides a strong incentive to stop writing. Both of these problems result in a world where we learn less, grow less, and take fewer risks with our writing.

What is wrong with truly being charitable, assuming the absolute best intentions and giving writers the license to deviate a little to let them make a point?

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#37
It comes back to what Marshall McLuhan said, "The Medium is the message": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

I've come to realize is that the expected audience is a crucial aspect of the communication requirements. On the internet, the audience is quite wide, and disagreement / outrage usually leads more responses / activity than does agreement and acceptance. I should say, in fact, that agreement leads to further sharing, whereas disagreement leads to comments. Thus, an article that some people agree with and some disagree with, gets re-shared and exposed to a lot of controversy. That eventually finds its way into other outlets, whereby each compelling article has a counter-article somewhere else in addition to all the substance-free vitriolic comments.

What the internet has really done is stop letting us get away with echo chambers, by breaking the walls between them. I think that is a good thing.

I should write a blog post on that :)

PS: This is not new. I think Bertrand Russell said: "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Now, those doubts are reinforced by the threat of being shown wrong. I think it's quite an art to articulate compelling arguments out of factually true statements, and even more of an art to think several steps ahead, choose which statements to focus on in order to draw certain reactions from an audience, and thus build receptivity to your next statements. Daniel Dennett said: You should be able to understand your opponent's arguments so well that you can say it back and they say "I wish I had put it that way". And of course, to do that, we shouldn't just write, we should also read, and all be exposed to the other arguments, instead of the echo chambers that social networks make money off of:

https://sealedministries.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/3-reasons-...

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#38
The way I see it, defensive writing is also a kind of self-indulgent, narcissistic behaviour which seeks gratification from always being "correct" and never being proven "wrong".

It requires a certain dose of humility to admit that something you've said was wrong or to accept some parts of the opponent's opinion.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#40

I feel compelled to write about race issues because I am a person of color. The issues directly impact my life. But I'm afraid because readers might be pissed off enough to get me fired. :/

Excuse my ignorance but do Asians "count" as people of color? I thought that usually referred to Latinos and African Americans? I know that university admissions PoC don't include Asians, in fact most admissions standards are stacked against them.

Yes, I am a person of color. The dictionary definition of people of color is any non whites.

Edit: There is a long explanation of why Asians are sometimes excluded. The short answer is racism against Asians.

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