I occasionally find myself giving advice that seems… rather obvious. I don’t mind giving obvious advice – at least I don’t have to worry afterward about whether the advice was wrong… ;-P Since I must have something to worry about afterward, however, my worry in this case seems to direct itself to wondering whether I might have come off as sarcastic. I don’t worry about this when the interaction has taken place in person, where voice tone would clarify my affect. But I often find myself wincing just after hitting the “send” button on my email, wondering why I didn’t take a bit more time to clarify my tone before sending the message out into the world.
Today, perhaps because I’m very tired (even by my standards) and had an unusually large number of “urgent” problems waiting for me when I reached the office, I’ve now done this several times. To take just one simple example from this morning: wouldn’t there have been a better way of expressing the following point?
My intention in offering [to do x] was actually to do some informal ethnographic work, in order to try to get a bit of an “insiders” view of what [y] need [...]
My experience has been that this kind of ethnographic process doesn’t work very well if people experience you as trying to advance the interests of your own organisation or interact in a formal sense. The idea is to provide a fairly nonthreatening and noncommittal environment, so that people won’t have to worry about any long-term consequences or constantly be thinking about their “negotiating position” [...]
I am of course happy to participate in whatever way [A] thinks is appropriate – but my guess is that, the less “official” my visits, the more useful I will be, and the more efficiently I can work… Since I’m doing this on borrowed time, efficiency is a bit of a major personal concern… ;-)
I actually wrote this quite earnestly: I’ve been asked to do something (to avert any possible misunderstanding, this request did not come from my employer) that, I suspect, won’t come off as intended, but I don’t actually regard the decision as my call, because I won’t suffer any personal consequences if the wrong call is made. But reading over the exchange now, the sheer obviousness of what I was pointing out makes me worry that the mail will read as a bit of an insult to the recipient, who surely must have already considered this issue… Occupational hazard of teaching, perhaps, to jump to the conclusion that, when someone makes a different decision than you would have made, it must be because they haven’t learned some really basic skill… I went into lecture mode on autopilot… Very frustrating…
Oh well… Nothing to be done about it at this point…
Nothing in the tone or advice sounds offensive to me. What is interesting from the perspective of a symptom is that you worry that you might have sounded this way. You’re often apologetic in this way, which speaks to how you see yourself being received by others. Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad quality (for those others), but I sense you experience a lot of anxiety over it.
I think I should have re-read your second post in the other thread before clicking ’submit’. :P
Wincing at something I wrote in an email or online happens to me almost every day.
And nothing in your email has an offensive tone per se, but it does sound a little unnecessarily defensive in places perhaps…maybe…tone electronically is a hard thing to gauge. Hence we have emotes :)