Shakespeare
Sometimes when we write for a wide, varied audience, for instance when we update our status on FB, tweet on Twitter, etc., we may forget that there is such a thing as looking at an issue from an angle, and if an audience detached from the view in our sights as we say what it is we want to say were to read the post, they will not grasp the issue even when what is being talked about is familiar or simple to understand.
For example, you may come across posts by people who know each other in off-line life responding to a post about censorship on Facebook. The responders may have already talked about Facebook censorship in off-line discourses during encounters they had with each other and the online exchange may be a mere continuation of this discourse with chances the topic may have strayed into subjective territory there.
You may be familiar with Facebook censorship but as long as the concept has not been mentioned and words have not been uttered that evoke the issue as you know it in your mind, in the main post as well as comments that follow, and the participants keep looking at it from an angle you cannot see, then they may be mad people conversing as far as you are concerned.
It will all be like happening on an advanced stage of a conversation in the next room or behind a wall. The subject matter of the discussion may be familiar to you but unless words that highlight what is being talked about are uttered, you will fail to get on-board, so to speak, and remain clueless as to what it is that is being discussed.
The talk coming through the wall will not make sense to you ...
I tend to do this sometimes in posts I make on especially facebook. I come out assuming people will grasp the issue from the get go and blunder further by using language I normally use in my daily life is sufficient for the task. For instance, I will post about Facebook's unique, tailor made method of censoring my account in language devoid of the grammatical rules we are accustomed to and start off as though I am standing or sitting in the same room and looking at the same display with clear evidence of the censorship that my audience can also see.
It all ends up sounding mental to the unwary and, considering what is being overlooked (rules of effective communication on a public forum, etc), they cannot be blamed for thinking I have gone bananas ...
I should state here that it may very well signify a mental challenge of sorts in some cases but in mine, I am happy to say it never does. It is with me basically a show of me at my most relaxed state, a state in which I tend to think some things do not really matter in the end because the point I am making will be grasped even when they are not there or adhered to in the case of rules.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly ... they'll go through anything. You read and you are pierced.
-Aldous Huxley -
Brave New World ...
Think here of such like capitalization or official speak ...
You can call it carelessness and I personally just have to be careful I do not get the careless bug recurring too many times in these posts otherwise the label "mentally challenged" may eventually fit.
What I am thankful about is this tendency seldom manifests when I write articles meant for the same online environment and audience, especially those I post to my blog. Here, I always follow the better rules that allow for information to be disseminated as effectively as is possible to as wide an audience as can be, chief of which is to ensure I am communicating my thoughts by striving to be understood, the best way to this end being adherence to the standard of the language, the grammatical rules and such ... making it formal and as simple as is possible to give as little room for "interpretations" as is possible.
I will not go into why I deliberately put the quotation marks around the word "interpretations".
In essence I strive to spoon feed my audience. And it is by this that I am understood and taken seriously worldwide.
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