Bloggomunications

I am surprised at how much I have learned from blogging. Obviously writing more and writing regularly has honed my technical skills. I am far more conscientious about word choice and sentence formation, hopefully grammar but I ain’t fer sure on that.

I have learned about  food and customs and people from around the world, religions, governments, joys, sorrows and illnesses. I have made friends. I have laughed and cried and ground my teeth in anger over injustices visited upon my friends.  Just as people do when making friends in “real life”, in the blogosphere you get used to people’s idiosyncrasies and styles of communication. When are they joking? When are they serious? Who is sensitive? Who has a tough hide?  My friend Brigitte wrote a Freshly Pressed piece on Blogging Etiquette, which is a good read for new bloggers as well as those that have been around a while.

I am a fairly blunt communicator. On WordPress I have learned to hold my tongue, don’t respond in anger (or at least don’t hit send in anger), don’t tease someone if you don’t know how they will take it, be sincere, be positive, be kind. I don’t think I’m particularly diplomatic and I call ’em like I see ’em. I think I’m fairly in tune to the blogs I follow regularly and I can tell when there is action going on between the lines.

I guess where I’m slowly going with this is that while we form friendships here on WordPress, we are still typing. We aren’t Skyping so we can see facial expressions. We aren’t on the phone so we can hear voice inflections. We are typing words on a screen. And as with email or texting, sometimes what you  type isn’t what you meant or you didn’t mean it like that! So what if you do hurt someone’s feelings by accident? What if someone calls you out for something you wrote to them in the Comments section that they didn’t care for?

Instead of getting defensive, dramatic, self-righteous, etc… pause for a minute and reread what you wrote. Ask yourself, “is there a chance that my comment didn’t come across the way I meant it to?” Just take a breath and think, “how would I react if someone wrote this to me?”

WordPress is such a gift. It is generally such a positive place and if people need to rant, they need to rant, it’s not about you, it’s about the writer and what they need to express. That doesn’t mean that our words don’t have consequences and sometimes people don’t want to read our rants and that is fair. My main point is, in the Comments section, if necessary think hard before you hit Reply.

You never know when you might deliver a back-handed compliment.