1. Thread about online communication and the alluring but false notion that you can't communicate tone on the internets.
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2. In face-to-face communication, people communicate using not just words but body language and word emphasis. This indeed is lost online.
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3. I got drilled in English writing classes about how the sentence "I only took 3 widgets" works in speech but is ambiguous in writing.
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4. But is it really ambiguous? Yeah, in theory "only" could modify "took" and not "3." In practice, it doesn't. Word choice matters.
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5. So online, we use word choice and context in lieu of sentence-level stress to communicate emphasis. But there's more.
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6. We use contextual phrases, like how hashtag-sorry means "not actually sorry." We vary speech registers: more netspeak = less serious.
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7. We use emoticons. We use deliberate misspellings, like "teh." We vary capitalization: aNaRcHy CaSe = mockery.
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8. All of this relies on a shared online culture - but so do offline speech groups, e.g. eye contact doesn't mean the same thing everywhere.
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9. In speech, you don't spell, so you can't misspell; you probably don't preplan your sentence, so you can't use word choice as carefully.
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I agree with your premises, but I also think many people overestimate the amount of shared understanding of how to convey tone in writing -- or perhaps underestimate the diversity of their readers in an online context.
May 28, 2019 · 6:09 PM UTC
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