On Aug 16, 2012, at 7:18 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Ryan Lane wrote:
What is
your plan to clean up the mess you made?
I need to call you out on this MZ. This is an incredibly rude way to
phrase this.
I get that our community tends to accept this kind of behavior, but I
think we should really put effort into coming up with some method of
discouraging people from acting this way.
What would have been a politer way to phrase the question? I originally
wrote "when are you going to clean up the mess you made?", but I rewrote it.
"the mess you made".
Right there, in that phrase, you have aggressively indicated the following:
a) That you believe someone fucked up;
b) That you think they're incompetent;
c) That you think they're being lazy about it
None of that is helpful.
This communication style typically causes the exact opposite response from what you
apparently want to have happen. I can't speak for others, but when someone talks to
*me* this way, I start tuning them out.
Honey = flies.
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Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
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