impatience of Job

[calimac]

I think I've confirmed what my superpower is. It's the ability to write things that look perfectly clear to me, but which cloud readers' minds and make them think I've written something quite different. And since what they think I wrote, as opposed to what I actually did write, is quite ridiculous, they then round and abuse me for it. And no number of repetitions or explanations will convince them that I believe what I said I believe, and not what they think I believe. That a sensible explanation might be more plausible than a ridiculous one does not seem to enter their minds, at least not if the writer is me.

This has happened in my own LJ comments section, as well as on bulletin boards elsewhere. I've even had it in reviews of my academic writings.

A typical example might be that I say that some people hold a view, and am taken as saying that this view is universal, and what's more unquestionably right. Or that some action is inadvisable in certain tactical circumstances, which is taken as saying that it should never be done, and is loathsome unto my sight.

Further wrinkle 1: Occasionally they do read and understand my explanations and elaborations. But since, though these are consistent with what I wrote originally, they're not consistent with what the reader imagined I wrote, I am then accused of being shifty with definitions, playing "No True Scotsman," etc.

Further wrinkle 2: If there is a third-party moderator for this forum, then any grumpiness I show in response to these misreadings, even if it's only a sigh of exasperation, will bring from the moderator a public chiding, of a kind rarely if ever administered in other people's arguments. Whereas any rudeness addressed to me, even if it goes so far as a physical threat, brings no public comment from the authorities.

Rarely, the shoe is on the other foot. I respond to something somebody wrote, and they deny that they hold any such view. In that case, I always promptly quote their words that said it. (This never brings a response.) But nobody insisting I believe something, after I've said I don't hold those views, ever attempts to rebut by quoting me saying it.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this was spurred by a particular incident or is just a general cri de coeur, but it made me smile ruefully (try not to picture it). I find it quite believable, and think it may happen to you more than to others because you tend to assume that the people reading your words are intelligent, fair-minded, careful readers, when they may be fewer than three of these things, and quite possibly none. Hence you may not ask in advance, "How might this be misconstrued or twisted by someone reading inattentively or maliciously?" and may omit a pre-emptive clarification that, while dialectically redundant, would still earn its rhetorical keep.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Both.

"Careful" is I think the most often-missing quality. People will skim and jump to conclusions. If they weren't intelligent, they couldn't attack with the complex sophistication that they do.

Oh, I put in clarifications, all right. And then I repeat and repeat them in my replies. They're never enough, and sometimes they even cause the trouble in the first place. (If I say, "This view is not a fringe opinion that may be ignored, because informed and knowledgeable people have held it," even if I also repeat that they're not everybody and that this is not an Argument from Authority, sure enough ...)

C.S. Lewis wrote, "I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right, the readers will most certainly go into it." (Aha, Root & Martindale's "Quotable Lewis" proves its usefulness at last!)

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I've had that experience more than once, and often enough, as you describe in your case, it's been as a result of having statements that I carefully qualified or limited read as flat absolutes. So I quite sympathize. I suspect it's a result of your being a precisionist whose statements are being read by people to whom the precisionist way of framing statements is not merely unfamiliar but alien.