December 2006

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Communication
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Do yourselves a favor. If something you read online makes you angry or hurts your feelings, walk away for a bit before responding. Then take the wise step of reading it all the way through a second time. You might find that in your hurry to make your point you have missed that of the writer.

This piece of advice comes to you from someone who followed it quite recently, thus avoiding making an ass of herself.

As is no doubt obvious, the reason for taking the time to re-read is to make sure you are, in fact, responding to what the writer wrote, not to what you think the writer wrote. Had I blasted off my first thoughts on the piece that prompted this, I would have been doing the latter, and it would have been embarrassing.

Since I knew I was tired when I first read the writer's thoughts (and I'm being vague on purpose as to which writer), I decided to work on my response after I had had some sleep.

Once awake and refreshed, I saw that I had missed a couple of words reading the first time. Those words made all the difference, and made my original anger erupt instead as a sigh of relief, that I had not done something stupid.

Stopping to reread. That will go down as one of the best things I did all week.