Name calling
Joy Beeson
wrote:
> Calling me a troll is not name calling?
Nope, it's a false accusation. At least I *thought* it was false, or
at least reckless, until you chose to divert attention from your
accuser's misbehavior to your own.
[essay on "show, don't tell" suppressed]
[maybe I should write it and post it on N3F_Writers]
You had a golden opportunity to make your accuser look like a twit.
All you had to do was to answer the accusation in a calm and adult
manner.
With a very modest investment of skill and effort, you could have made
her *feel* like a twit, but I won't go into how because it's always
better to try to protect the other person's dignity -- if some
careless person falls into a sewer, it's much safer to bring him a
hose and some towels than to jump in and try to hold his head under.
Now for the writing-teacher hat: If someone completely and totally
misunderstands one of my posts, I have found it *very* advisable to
save my response as a draft and wait a few hours to give someone else
a chance to explain -- a correction sounds much more convincing if it
comes from a third party.
Not to mention that sometimes the third-party explanation isn't quite
right in a way that pinpoints the spot where the original post was
ambiguous.
--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net