One hazard with written communication in my profession and personal life is tone. When I was a big, geeky letter writer as a teenager, this wasn’t much of an issue with all the correspondence between my friends and me; we all took the time to actually write something, why interpret it as mean-spirited? I figure the problem has grown with electronic communication due its immediacy and anonymity; who hasn’t fired off a terse posting in a forum in the last decade? Only computer-averse members of the WWII generation. Facebook, I’ve concluded, is the biggest collection of people flinging monkey crap at each other over politics, religion and whose team sucks.
I think these people in Detroit have a solid idea with their proposed punctuation mark for sarcasm. Now before you dismiss it, mull these arguments over:
- Emoticons (which I’m not keen on) have been around since at least the late Eighties. My friend Lester, an earlier adopter of online communication than me could validate/refute this. Personally, I prefer the full-fledged icons iChat renders, not shanghai’d colons and parentheses. These come off as smug.
- Some languages, namely Spanish, use certain symbols at the beginning of the sentence to let the reader know it’s a question, order or exclamation. The upside-down question mark is a huge boost.
Until there’s a way to convey body language, real facial expressions and actual tone, I am in the SarcMark Camp. A lack of the symbol means the author is serious, not teasing, not angry and not condescending. So the recipient can stop accusing the writer of hurting his/her feelings and get on with the conversation. I would also like to take a writing course at ACC (UT is too pricey, how else are they going to pay for Mack Brown’s losing bonus) to polish up my style.
The friends I have who do more writing for a living will hopefully throw in their opinions regarding this. I am relieved to see I was already following the key guidelines of e-mail etiquette from here. Now if there was a button to give the recipient (including myself some days) thicker skin, the Internet would be closer to perfect.