One of the worst things about writing is the lack of depth that it has in comparison to other forms of communication. You don’t have the inflections that voice has, or the facial expressions and body language that face to face or video communication has. This means that what you write can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, creating a huge misunderstanding.

This happened to me recently in my posting about the con’s of problogging, where some people thought I was trying to make problogging sound like a really hard job, where I was instead only implying that it isn’t the celebrity lifestyle that many people picture when they think about working from home on the computer all day.

I was hoping to inform people looking at the career, and instead some people too offense thinking that I was complaining about the job. These are the misunderstandings that are difficult to avoid in writing, and something that even I need to work on.

Making sure that you work hard to be very explicit in your writing to provide proper tone, and sticking to that single tone, can reduce problems of misunderstanding.

I am sorry to those that thought I was belittling the difficulties that go along with their careers.

Originally posted on August 9, 2007 @ 10:19 pm