BLACK BEAUTY IS A'WAITING

BLACK BEAUTY IS A'WAITING
THIS BEAUTY ROCKS!

Friday, August 27, 2010

OOPS - MY MISTAKE. NO GOOGLE ACCOUNT REQUIRED; BUT READ ON: THERE'S MORE

I take full credit for the retraction I'm about to print in response to my erroneous advice that you need to open a Google account in order to view the blog; you don't. OK; I admitted it. You use the system to enter your email account and create a password for the blog site. No new email creation required.

But what does this whole event tell us? Well, for one, that even the most conscientious amongst us can be in error. And what an interesting word that is: con (with) scient (using science or logic / reason) ious (an attempt to use all the vowels in the English alphabet in one suffix). 

For another, that things are not always as they might first appear to be. So, going through the process of signing up to view my blog it appears that you need to set up a Google account. But in reality, you don't. It just seems that you do.

It follows, therefore, from the previous observation that instructions are not always as clear to the reader as they are to the writer; this brings up the issue of differing perspectives and their influence on what we deem necessary to make ourselves understood.

And this last point brings me to an observation I had recently when I asked a dear friend to not abstain from reading material I had posted just because it didn't agree with my friend's viewpoint. To me, the request was meant as a gesture of open mindedness - you know, that sensation we feel when we know we are right and want everyone else to see how clever we are in our 'rightness'.  But I observed that my friend could easily have taken it as less a request and more a challenge: read me and learn how silly your viewpoint is; marvel at my clearly superior argument, my perfectly focused logic.

How difficult it is, in truth, to convey our exact meaning with the written word, where we don't have the body language, the voice inflection, the non-verbal 'hooks' to persuade the other person to our opinion.

All of which may explain my fascination with reading, and writing. Oh yes, I enjoy a good debate, a challenging argument, the one-on-one, face-to-face discussion. But when you try to distill it all onto paper, and do it well enough to be both understood and then, agreed with ..... ah, that is another proposition entirely.

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