Re: The humor problem - a suggestion

[Sharon Burton-Hardin <sharonburton -at- EMAIL -dot- MSN -dot- COM>]

Look, he tried to be funny. His timing was off. He missed the humor mark. It
happens. He explained what he was trying to do. It didn't work. We all have
days when it doesn't.

Why don't we all take a deep breathe and move on. No one, really, was hurt.
After the explanation, I think it is clear there was no personal attack. It
was a parody that didn't work. Sometimes they don't. That is why we avoid
humor in tech writing. It doesn't always work. Some of us have a humor genie
that lives inside us and sometimes it gets loose and writes stuff that it
shouldn't. Sometimes we have a bad day and do stuff that we shouldn't have.
I am sure that we have all written something that we wish we hadn't. There
it is. (I did once in a manual. I actually wrote "Premature ejection can
result in a blown disc." Really. And it went to press that way. I learned
that reviewers may not catch everything.)

I think that unsubscribing  is a bit of an overreaction. The delete key
works really well. If you don't like the thread, then ignore it. Unlike
life, here you can just delete the stuff you don't like. Diversity is
important, even when it doesn't meet your ideas of what diversity should be.

sharon

Sharon Burton-Hardin
President of the Inland Empire chapter of the STC
www.iestc.org
Anthrobytes Consulting
Home of RoboNEWS(tm), the unofficial RoboHELP newsletter
www.anthrobytes.com
Check out www.WinHelp.net!
See www.sharonburton.com!

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Taylor <sector_five -at- HOTMAIL -dot- COM>
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU <TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU>
Date: Tuesday, 02 March, 1999 8:40 PM
Subject: Re: The humor problem


|>Yeah, I am a big dork with a loud mouth and a seriously over-inflated
|>opinion of myself.  Hey, you might have to work with a jerk like me
|>someday.  Think of this as training.
|
|Uh, no. I may be forced to work with people you describe above, but I
|certainly don't have to read it by choice. Consider me unsubscribed.
|
|I'll probably get the "don't let the door hit on the ass on the way out"
|treatment, but that's better than having some buffoon presume he's
|capable of "training" me to work with idiots. I've seen the big dorks
|with the loud mouths and seriously over-inflated opinions of themselves
|come and go over the years but I have yet to find one that I could
|actually learn anything from - besides the lesson to steer clear of
|them.
|
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