“Text strips emotion; writers put it back.”

My good buddy Schwern runs geek2geek, a geekblog that, among other things, talks about how people communicate on-line, and how we resolve conflicts. (That site kind of grew out of the “How Not To Be an Asshole” section of his “How to be a Better Programmer” talk, and really, if nothing else, I love conferences like OSCON because the people giving talks get to use LOLCAT pictures and have the word ASSHOLE up on a giant display. But that’s neither here nor there.) At any rate, I’ve been greatly enjoying his series on how text lacks empathy, which deals with the perils of communicating on-line. I’ve been thinking a great deal about my on-line presence and my on-line voice in the past week or so—more than I normally do, that is—and Schwern hit on several points bang-on, points that I think help make sense of how people have interpreted the recent kerfuffling:

If you’re like me — and the name tag says I am — when you write you hear a little voice in your head. Maybe it’s telling you to shoot the President to impress Jodie Foster (I hear she’s into Prime Ministers now), but it’s probably just your own voice speaking what you’re writing. This is fine. The trouble comes when you forget that all the EMPHASIS and STRESS and WILD HAND GESTURES and FUNNY LOOKS that are going on in your head aren’t coming out on the page. We don’t think of them much when we speak, they tend to come naturally, so it’s all too easy to not realize when they’re missing.

Our tendency is to fill in voids with our own negative emotions. (…)

  can’t fix a problem unless you know about it

That’s the problem: we don’t realize there’s a problem. And it’s a hard problem to see. Going from the voice in your head to text on the screen there is no indication that anything is lost. No censor bleeping out parts. No red pen crossing bits out. No “emotions missing” icon. The loss is silent. If you’re not looking for it, you’d never know it happened.

I don’t have anything especially profound to add here, because I haven’t had time to fully sort and categorize everything I think about this issue other than “Holy crap, dude’s just expressed a whole bunch of things I’ve observed but hadn’t bothered to document coherently.” Like I said in the comments to my post on Bad Taste, I want to find ways to—well, not change my voice, but to get it across more accurately. Feel free to take the ball and run with it in the comments. GO GO GO! *blows referee whistle*

Comments are Closed

  1. rebyj says:

    Good article

    If an author wants you to understand the characters motivations thru their dialogue there is a definite need for the emotions to be plainly attributed in the text.

    FWIW …A quote from one of my own posts yesterday after a misunderstanding on one of the comment threads..

    “I’m generally clueless and dense as a stick without …the
    “ she said ironically”
    “ she said sarcastically”
    “she said with all seriousness” “

    people that know and love me in real life pretty much have to tell me what they mean, I’m pretty dense.

  2. azteclady says:

    Interestingly enough, Candythustra *ahem* I have no problem seeing all the wild gesturing and happy skipping and weird faces when I read your posts. Or SBSarah’s. Between all the parenthetical commentary, and the cursing, and… *shrug* Methinks you be doin’ fine.

  3. R. says:

    I grok.

    My friends and I know how to ‘read’ our plain text messages to each other—because how we speak, emote, and gesture is already in each others’ personal ‘databases’.  Easy enough to fill in the blanks when you’ve already got all that data,…

    But communicating with someone I’ve never met face to face?  Sometimes I come off as a total jerk and end up sticking my foot in my mouth, yet again.

    Is it inherent in most humans to assume the worst in the [sometimes cryptic] words of another, or is it all spawned by personal insecurities and doubts?

    [movement57 – how does it know??]

  4. SonomaLass says:

    I teach communication skills at the college level, and my students and I often talk about this.  We notes that in online and informal text communication, we use various emoticons to try and add that level of nonverbal communication that we feel missing; we also use caps, bolds, italics, et cetera.  This seems to be, at least partly, a consequence of sending written messages in contexts where we might previously have used the phone or even communicated in person, before all this technology changed the everyday channels we use to communicate.  These are contexts in which we use an informal voice, and where we may not be careful choosing our words (we’re often in a hurry).

    When we speak informally, we’re used to having our noverbal communication moderate our spoken message—tone of voice or facial expression says “sarcasm” or “gentle teasing” or “don’t take me too seriously” or whatever.  If that’s how we hear it/see it in our heads, then when we are writing informally, we may toss out the words and then be surprised that they were taken more seriously, or more literally, than we meant.

    I like how rebyj connects that to those books we love to read—good authors know that we need to hear the dialog in our heads, so in addition to using dialog that is appropriate for the characters and their situation, they give us enough information about what the characters are thinking & feeling, and even how they are speaking, that we can “hear” it right.

    Gee, and I thought the plagiarism thread was the only way this site was going to intersect my professional life.  Ha!

  5. My suggestion for posting in a way that readers, even ones who aren’t SBTB regulars, will “get” you:

    Every time Sarah posts, include the picture of her, preggers, at David Hasselhoff’s plane-signing.

    Every time you post, include the picture of you at the RITAs in your polka-dot dress and feather boa. I have one if you don’t.

  6. Suisan says:

    I dunno. I never read anything of yours that seemed outright vicious when an alternate reading of sardonic and slightly slaphappy humor worked just as well.

    Sometimes you have to look pretty hard for alternate motives.

    Carry on! Suisan

  7. Robin says:

    I’ll just repost over here what I saw in the other thread, since it’s more appropriate over here:

    And I’ve been thinking a lot about my voice in the past several days. I want to get across my goofiness and bluntness, and tone down the impression of anger and meanness.

    Although I’m sure you realize that you will never please everyone.  I’ve been been accused of being too blunt and mean, as well as being not direct enough and not cutting enough.  When I first started posting a lot, it drove me nuts for a while until I realized that I can only do so much, and it’s gonna have to be good enough.

    I can be extremely sarcastic in person, but I try to flatten that out in my online communication and am okay if people think I can’t appreciate snarky humor.  I can, but I choose (most of the time—this week has been calling to and begging my inner shark to come out and play) to “act dumb” sometimes when confronted with sarcasm.  And that decision is tied to what I can live with at the end of the day and what I want to accomplish when I speak.

    The second thing—what I want to accomplish—is where the balance comes in, IMO, because you can never be wholly responsible for how other people take to or what they take from your comments.  Sure you can try to be clear, and if it matters to you, respectful, but I’m often amazed at how it seems we’re all speaking foreign languages to each other in online conversations, and while I’ve gotten used to it somewhat, I’m not fully acclimated to it.

    So the way it ultimately breaks down for me is this:  you can’t control what another person says or thinks, but everyone who speaks sets a tone for the responses they’re directly or inadvertently inviting.  This is the aspect of “free expression” we don’t often talk about—that while we may want to preserve the most open possible environment for the open exchange of ideas and views, every community, every blog, every messageboard has a certain tone, and those in charge do help set that tone (but not completely, for obvious reasons). If you don’t like what you’re getting back, maybe an adjustment in your own tone is due.  But, as you know, every adjustment creates unintended consequences, so in the end it still comes back to what you can best live with at the end of the day, IMO.

  8. Robinjn says:

    Really interesting discussion since as a strong voiced person myself I sometimes struggle with the same issues.

    I’m one of the new people here but I did light on the site a day or so before the stinky brown stuff levitated into the whirling metal blades. I am now a total addict to the blog. Not because of the CE scandal, but because it’s smartly written and often hysterically funny. I’m sure my office mates are probably psychologically scarred for life by the odd sounds coming from my cube the past few days.

    I have never found any sort of personal attack on your blog. Yeah, you say “I hate this book.” And maybe some people do come away from that thinking “gee, maybe I’m stupid for liking that book,” but an equal number probably come away thinking “gee are the SB on drugs? That was the best book EVAH!”

    While I think it’s good to soul-search stuff like this, for me, in the end, it came down to this being who I am. I will freely admit that I’m often too outspoken, that I sometimes end up with my foot in my mouth, that I can be controversial. I’m a dog trainer and really active on a lot of agility lists and I know there are people out there who truly despise me. OTOH there are people who come up to me at shows all the time and say they read everything I write and thank me for speaking up for their POV.

    Okay this is way too long. I don’t think you should change a thing, because I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong and I think you’ve done a lot of stuff really right. Be strong—be bitches!

  9. Dragonette says:

    So true – I wrote a letter to my boyfriend today and he wrote back, asking how much sugar I’d had!  I normally write something, think about it, edit it, go do something else, re-edit it and then when it gets sent, it’s all formatted, punctuated and close-to professional.  I didn’t do any editing on the letter I sent today, and it came out like a bunny on caffiene.  I didn’t realize how much emotion I strip from my writing when I do that.

  10. Robinjn says:

    One more thought about this. Here’s what it comes down to for me with my strong voice.

    I realize that some people do not like me for the way I write and how I say things. I also realize that sometimes I have inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings and when/if it’s pointed out to me I often feel really rotten about it if my words were misconstrued.

    But the truth is, some people are not going to like me even if I nice-nice everything up.

    I’d rather be disliked for being the person I am than be disliked for pretending to be a person I’m not.

  11. Delia says:

    Ouch, I’d be careful with that shooting-the-president bit.  I know a girl who made a comment like that once and got a special visit from men in suits the next day.

  12. Sandra D says:

    I’ve lost track of the times I’ve said something online in chat, blog, etc, and had someone come back with OUCH. This always prompts me to wish for a sarcasm font.

  13. pennifer says:

    Sandra D, my friends and I (geeks, all of us) use what we call “sarcasm tags” when we’re texting or writing online. If we want to be clear that we’re being sarcastic we write

    at the start and when we’re done we write

    . Works every time!

  14. rebyj says:

    Sandra D just needs a ” I’m Canadian” font LOL

  15. Anonymous says:

    Frankly, you come across just fine. The problem isn’t your “voice”. The problem is that your site just had a high profile scuffle with Cassie Edwards’s weirdly devoted fanbase, along with traffic from people who don’t normally visit. Many of these people are easily offended and self-righteous, and have done nothing but squawk about how “mean” your site content is because it doesn’t fit into their narrow view of what romance blogs should be like.

    That’s my two cents. If you want to try and change your online voice, that’s your decision. Just trying to put across how I view it.

  16. xatya says:

    Oh my. I have just come to a site that is entitled “Smart Bitches who Love Trashy Novels.” Where are all the rainbows and kittens and unicorns and hugs all the time? I am so confused. With a title such as that, I thought I’d be getting something different.

    *grin*

    Seriously, y’all don’t misrepresent yourselves. If I wanted pretty-pretty puff pieces there are plenty of other sites to check out. I lurves blunt opinions leavened with generous doses of funny.

    Please trust that you’re doing wonderful work—‘cause y’are.

    Thank you for doing it.

  17. Poison Ivy says:

    Yes, but the romance world is rife with people who think they have the right to tell others never to be critical, never to be honest, never to say anything that some other romance person might dislike, and so on, because “it will hurt romance.” I find this insistence on being mealymouthed sickening. And worse, it drives out quality discussion. And hurts romance.

    In the year or so I’ve been visiting this site, I have never read a mean comment by the site owners. I have seen some mean posts by commenters, but most of these people also tend to be illiterate and illogical, and so I dismiss them because—let’s face it, they’re morons.

  18. Silver James says:

    Learning to *read* a person’s intent from the written word with no previous RL interaction is an exercise everyone should attempt. “Learn” is the operative word here. When a writer starts to self-censure based on what may or may not be accurate perceptions by the readers, I think that writer is doing herself a real disservice. The whole point of blogging is to express one’s opinion, in one’s own voice. It’s up to us, the readers, to learn how that voice sounds.

    I’m new to SB-TN, but I’ve already picked up on your style, Candy. Just be you, ‘kay?

  19. Gemiwing says:

    I’m new here, having found the site due to the CE scandal (dum dum dummm). That was a month ago give or take. I keep coming back BECAUSE of your voices. I love romance novels passionately but most of the other blogs and messageboards won’t let me be smarmy sarcastic and well.. me! I’m not a puppy kitty happy fun time rainbow kinda gal.

    Please don’t change your tone, I’m begging you! This is the first romance site that I’ve felt safe in. Too often in life we’re forced to simply roll over and play nice. I need a place to just play me… er.. huh huh you know what I mean.
    I think that once people calm down and things go back to normal (or close to it) you’ll find you have more traffic on the site stay because you give them a voice they can’t find anywhere else.

    If I want super go go bunny happy book review I know where to go. If I want to find all the romance and none of the bullshit- all I got is y’all. And I for one am happy as hell for that.

  20. Ocy says:

    Oh, Candy, please don’t change anything about the way you write.  You have tons of people who love y’all just the way you are.  It’s your blog, and if other people are looking for rainbows and kittenz, they can go look for a blog that’ll cater to them.  I’ve been reading you SBs for about a year now, not as long as some, but I’ve never had a hard time figuring out what exactly you meant.

  21. Sphinx says:

    Oh, come now!  It’s right there in the name: Smart Bitches.  That tells the reader straight-up what they’re in for; it proclaims in big letters “We are razor-keen ladies who refer to ourselves as bitches, so don’t even think we’ll hesitate to do a hatchet-job on yo’ ass”.  That can be intimidating to some folks, but it appears to have drawn you quite a crowd of devotees so far.

    Don’t ever change, you glorious bitches.

  22. Poison Ivy says:

    And I’d like to point out that spoken-in-person language is just as confusing as pure written words. Referencing my prior comment, how could you tell in person if I was deadly serious or being facetious in calling mean commenters morons? You couldn’t, because in person I would make it come out amusingly, and smile sarcastically, and so forth. That does not negate that I meant they’re morons. It just is a socially acceptable of saying something in person. And yet, in print, you could assume either truth as well, that I was just joking—ha,ha, they’re morons—or that I was deadly serious: mean people who write illiterate and illogical comments are morons. Full stop. Full stop for the humorous effect? Or full stop for the serious effect? Either way, the person to whom I “speak” has a choice in what s/he hears.

    Don’t worry so darn much about being misconstrued, or about not conveying the exact, subtle shades of meaning you intend. Because, remember, at least 10% of people are drunk, high, or otherwise non compos mentis anyway. And the ones who want to misunderstand will. And then there are the morons who never met a logical thought pattern in their lives. And then the rest of us are all filtering your words through our ego-meters, waiting for our chance to talk. Which this site provides. Thank you.

  23. Denni says:

    My example would be photos.  Without movement, elements can be lost and other elements can be gained.

    Love this site, been lurking around for about a year.  IMO none of the commentators is mean, and few of the posters.  I totally enjoy truth, sarcasm, and dry humor…ther sites offer gushy, mushy, pap.  We even boast a quasi Hoff fan club.

    Viva La Bitches!

  24. Denni says:

    And…what other site offers poetry for all occasions?

  25. dl says:

    SonomaLass…if you’ve recently arrived for the plagiarism, you’ll be suprised how many interesting topics are discussed here, along with all the other fun stuff.  An amazing number of writing professionals comment here.

    Welcome and enjoy!

  26. megalith says:

    One thing this site also offers is a kind of built-in course correction for those of us with a tendency to shoot our mouths off before the brain is fully engaged: As anyone knows who’s spent longer than a minute and a half here, authors read this blog and post here. I remember well when I first started reading this blog I posted some rant about an author and about a week later I saw a post in a different thread with her name on it. Yeah, I felt about *this* small. It’s a lot harder to talk stupid about someone when the person you’re talking about is standing right there, you know? Not that my feelings were not legitimate, but I definitely would have made it sound less like I wore a tinfoil hat around the house, right?

  27. Candy says:

    I’m not thinking of changing my voice—not at all! The profanity, the irreverence, the random Internet macros and in-jokes…I’m just pondering the times when people have told me I sound angry or mean on the blog, and I can actually see what they mean, and I’m attempting to come up with a way to replace some of the channels lost to pure text.

    I kinda like Jennifer Echols’ idea of showing a picture of me in a polka-dot dress and a feather boa. Or a zebra hat.

  28. Robin says:

    Hey, Candy, is that dress a Marimekko print?

  29. Bonnie C says:

    Just another note to chime in on the “please don’t stop what you’re doing for cripe’s sake because you’re the only thing keeping me sane at work” bandwagon.

    Anyone know what a “cripe” is, anyway?

    Anyhoo, the only reason for you to change your tone, Candy, is if YOU are no longer in love with it. As people we grow and change – hopefully emotionally and in maturity and not just in pants size – and we want to reflect that accomplishment to those around us. If that’s what you are feeling now, more power to you. But don’t change simply because there are those here who can’t take the heat and don’t have the history with your site to understand the directions y’all are coming from.

    Most of us are here because we very much enjoy the “snort beverage of your choice through your nose” brand of snark and damn funny humor that you and Sarah provide. Those that came here randomly or through this CE controversy or who really don’t hold with this particular brand of humor don’t have to stay. That’s the beauty of free press and the internet and entertainment in general – WE the people have the choice to decide how to spend our precious free time.

    I choose to spend my time here, inventing new sounds to scare my coworkers.

  30. I made a comment along these lines on another blog last week – so much of what we communicate in person comes through in tone of voice and body language, which is obviously lacking on the internet. And what we don’t “hear” we fill in with our own assumptions – is the speaker “like” me or not? If so, then we can assume they share a sense of humor, etc. If not, then everything they say has *evil*  undertones. LOL

    You can’t please everyone all the time – particularly people with a chip on their shoulder.

  31. rooruu says:

    If this site had been one which had been hit with the Hallmark stick (puppies/kittens etc) – and broken it (ha, and that’s a reference burgled from which writer? – one who has been reviewed here…..) then I’d not have hung about chuckling as long as I have.  It’s not only the voices of the SBs, but the many commenters who make this a community of voices and opinions and ideas.

    On the other hand, email and the internet have made us all more public writers, and as you would expect skill levels vary in communicating meaning.  Text is stripped of the supporting cast of gesture and intonation that’s there for speech; and in the informality of many online communications we don’t revise or review as we might for more ‘serious’ written work. 

    Perhaps sometimes we only learn how we come across in emails/online from the responses of others.  And then you get to choose to whom you listen, and why, and what you then do about it.

    On the third hand, I fer one am so fraffly glad that Jane Austen didn’t have either emoticons or taggy dude things available to her.

    It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife

    .

    Aaaargh!

  32. >>a wife

    .<<

    Oooh, rooruu, you just gave me chills!

    Candy, don’t change a thing.  As one of your early readers I can assure you that what attracted me to this site was the razor sharp wit.  Don’t blunt it.

  33. ladypeyton says:

    I like the site just fine as it is and have for years.  Your voices are wonderfully expressive.  I don;t think all the sebra hats, polka dot dresses and perfectly expressed opinions in the wrold would have kept some people visiting this site from name calling.  You unearthed something significant which threw dirt on their icon and nothing would have kept them from being loud and offended.

  34. ladypeyton says:

    Crap.  I, on the other hand, definitely need to brush up on my proofreading…

    That should have been “don’t think all the zebra hats”

  35. Joanna S. says:

    I think much of this “You can’t be mean when you talk about romance because it brings us all down to the level of cold, lonely, sex-starved shrews” is part of the larger argument that is often discussed here, namely that “romance” is meant to be about luuuurve and all things bright and shiny and NOT (as we here all know it truly is) about luuurve that can be aggressive, dirty, mean and downright naughty. 

    Yes, the boy gets the girl (or the girl the boy, or the boy the boy, etc.), but there’s so much awkwardness inbetween (at least in the case of the good authors there is).  And that is why most of us read this genre and this wonderful blog!  We want the awkwardness, the sarcasm, the quirkiness, and of course, the luuuurve because that is how WE are.  No, we’re not vampires, werewolves, Druids, what have you (o.k. – maybe some of you are…please don’t eat me (hur!)).  However, the authors we all love write these fantastical characters as people first and fantastical second…we luuurve these men and women and cheer for them to luuuurve each other because the awkwardness and conflict creates romance-as-human and the fiction that we enjoy and not a total farce.

    Both Candy and SB Sarah are never overtly mean, and more than half of the time write what I’m already thinking.  Any sort of “meanness” is usually a pointed argument that comes from the high standards we set for this genre, and thus, paying attention to what has been said (regardless of tone) can only help improve it.

  36. MplsGirl says:

    Bonnie C., My American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, doesn’t contain the word “cripe”. So, feeling sort of snarky this morning, I’ll provide my own definition: cripe is to darn as Christ is to damn. It’s an attempt to get the satisfaction of swearing without using profane language or offending one’s grandmother.

    I think SB Sarah and Candy’s tones are perfectly understandable. It’s those of us posting in the comments that can get confusing, though regular readers get to know the “voices” of regular commenters.

    I didn’t read Send (that book on email) but I read a number of reviews of it (so I feel like I read it). According to the reviews, the authors encourage the use of smileys and punctuation like exclamation points to help people “read” the emotion and intent of the writer in virtual messages/posts.

  37. Candy says:

    Robin: I have no idea if it’s a Marimekko print; I bought it from Banana Republic about four years ago for a friend’s wedding (I’m such a whore for bright colors and bold prints) and they may have licensed designs from them, or it may have been just something along the same style.

    Regarding Austen in particular and dry wit in general: First of all, I think it helps to have had exposure to that style; some people don’t get it right away, and some people just never get it—their irony-o-meter is either calibrated differently or missing entirely. In general, that sort of dry wit seems to embody elements of comic overstatement, comic understatement and/or absurdity delivered in a deadpan voice, and that first sentence in Pride and Prejudice juxtaposes all of these elements beautifully, which more than makes up for the lack of affective channels.

    However, not many of us are Austens.

    I also want you to know that I appreciate the fact that many of you enjoy my voice and that you don’t think anything needs to change; like I said above, I’m not thinking of changing it, just tweaking it a little so I’m a little bit more accurate in delivery. And while I appreciate the love, I also appreciate people letting me know when I’m a dickhead, and I’ve crossed the line (even by my estimation) in the past. Sometimes it’s not even necessarily the tone by itself; sometimes, it’s the use of tone in an inappropriate venue. I genuinely regret my smartass tone in the first post I made about the Cassie Edwards situation, for example; it diluted the message and was easily misinterpreted as schadenfreudinous glee.

    And finally: “Candythustra” needs more echo effect, for maximum proclamatory effect. Also more cowbell.

    Thus spake Candythustra(a…a…a…). *Will Ferrell starts whaling away and sweating in the background*

Comments are closed.

By posting a comment, you consent to have your personally identifiable information collected and used in accordance with our privacy policy.

↑ Back to Top