OK, I finally understand what that was intended to mean. There should be a question mark at the end, but that I can handle - the absence of a pronoun had me boggled. (I’m not too bright, but I mean well…)
The answer is, SoaP was being a malicious jerk. As Miller made clear, there’s simply no way that he could have not at least suspected that Sampiro’s thread was in fact about his mother’s dying (or at least looking like it).
Except for when you’re ribbing someone with whom you have an on-going teasing argument about his over-wordiness, this would have been rude and nasty under any circumstances, but under many, at least border-line acceptable. But SoaP has no on-going relationship with any member here, as he is a guest, and he did it in a thread where it was completely inappropriate, and it didn’t take a rocket-scientist to figure that out.
The problem I have with you, blinking, is that you don’t seem to be able to see this. Since it seems entirely obvious to anyone who wasn’t raised by elephant seals that this was a nasty and malicious thing to do, I was led to believe that you were being deliberately disingenuous, especially when you so humbly kept repeating the same damned questions again and again, appearing to deny in one post what you’d said in your previous one. Further, while you may now be saying that you’d been trying here * to say that you had found the OP (and Sampiro’s writings in general) to be too long and insufficiently interesting to read, the way you phrased it made it appear (to me, at least) that you had wanted to make that comment in **Sampiro’*s thread, and had refrained solely because you thought it would cause you to be ostracized.
If you are really being sincere about trying to improve your writing skills, then I have a few recommendations for you. What they all boil down to is trying to remember that there are real human beings who are going to be reading your posts. So before you hit that Submit Reply button, I urge you to read your post over carefully and ask yourself the following questions:
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Is my post relevant and likely to be interesting to anyone but me? As an example, when most people open a thread, it’s because they expect to be interested in the contents. That may or may not be the case once they’ve read it. But no one is opening the thread to find out that *you * weren’t interested in reading it. If you want to open a thread of your own critiquing someone’s writing style, you’ll probably get a fair discussion going. If you want to Pit someone for being long-winded or otherwise stylistically objectionable, you may get some interest. But it doesn’t belong in the original thread, because at that point, that’s not what anyone is reading that thread for.
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Is my post intelligible? You’ve found out to your surprise today that a lot of us are having trouble following your writing, mostly due to your inattention to punctuation and/or omitted words. Read your post over, trying very hard to put yourself in the place of someone who doesn’t know you personally and has no idea of what you’re trying to express beyond the words in that post. Clearly you’ve thought you’d been careful enough. What you’re being told today is that it hasn’t worked as well as you’d thought - you need to do it more effectively. Don’t be insulted or hurt - just try to do better. I promise, it will be useful for things far more important than posting on the SDMB!
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Is my post likely to be rude or hurtful? You’ve stated that you don’t think of this the same way you think of a personal conversation in this respect. We’ve been trying to tell you that it’s closer than you think. Yes, this is a place where the desperately shy can be wordy, and the timid can be brave. But it’s not fantasy land. There are real people here, often talking about real problems. For some of us, due to real-life isolation due to any number of different circumstances, this message board constitutes an important part of our social lives. For others, such as **Sierra ** and me, this is the only message board we’re involved in, and we treat it as we would any other social situation. Arguments can be angry, vehement, even vociferous. Insults can fly around like gnats. But look a little closer. Spite and malice aren’t common. Insults and arguments address a point; they aren’t usually done here just for the sake of being nasty.
Since you seem to be having trouble distinguishing between an acceptable (because relevant and pointed) insult and a malicious piece of spite for the sake of meanness, I suggest you simply try to avoid being nasty at all until that distinction becomes clearer to you. There are plenty of ways to disagree with someone without being nasty about it. By the way, I have not noticed that you personally have ever been spiteful. But since you’ve been having trouble understanding why **SoaP ** merited a warning, it’s apparently not a distinction that is intuitively obvious to you. Thus it’s best to simply avoid the issue entirely. Remember, the first and most important rule here is “Don’t be a jerk.” If you can’t tell what constitutes being a jerk, better to be safe than sorry.
I hope this helps. I’d truly like to believe that you are a nice guy who is just having trouble grasping these customs and standards (not necessarily rules, but customs can often be even more important).
Best wishes,
Oy!