Roy,
On 06/16/10 21:40, Roy Bamford wrote:
> As a native English speaker (from England) I view Jers reply as terse
> and to the point, completely lacking in tone.
interesting. Looking at the sentence
"When did you point this out to devrel?"
I would like to say that while it's not impolite per se it's implicitly
saying "You _have to_ point this out to dev rel" in my ears. A more or
less word-by-word translation to German ("Wann hast du das gegenüber
DevRel angesprochen?") would make perfect sense and carry the same
problem so I assume it's not an English language thing. In contrast asking
"Have you pointed this out to DevRel? What was their reaction?"
does not seem to have this mis-hearing problem, at least not to me.
I remember a guy of the German Unix User Group (GUUG) saying something like
"Communication is always oriented at the receiver".
Applying that to tone and avoiding mis-interpretation the sender has the
power (and arguably the responsiblity) to sounds as friendly as needed
to be sure it will not be understood as unfriendly. In a way there's
always a way to be friendlier - _without_ faking anything.
Some of you may know ArneBab's signature saying:
"Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it."
Maybe not applying tone means applying tone without realizing, too.
Best,
Sebastian
