One of the most crucial things to remember in communications is the importance of tone. That might sound odd coming from me; after all, I take a fairly snarky tone on this blog. That's reflected right there in the title though - note the term "Rants" right there at the top, in the title. Which gets to part of what's important in tone management - truth in advertising. Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis understands that I like to let loose with rants, and expects it - it's part of what I do here.

Where people get in trouble is when they use inappropriate tone based on the expectations of the audience. For instance - what works for me here wouldn't work well in a press release. The audience for a press release isn't expecting the kind of advocacy I do here.

There's another thing that an awful lot of people forget though, and it's far more widespread on controversial (especially political) topics than it tends to be in the tech sphere. It happens here though; read through any long conversation about Atom and RSS, and you're sure to find some vitriol (proving that any topic, no matter how small the niche, attracts partisans). What am I talking about? Language use. To put it most simply, the first person who pulls out the curse words loses. You can see that playing out in the ongoing reaction to the Washington Post's blog comments thing - a lot of the cries of censorship that came up included an astounding amount of cursing. What the advocates forget is that - as soon as the curse words come out, most people stop listening. More than that, they tend to discount future statements from that source as well.

This is something I had to learn the hard way - my father always swore quite a bit, and of course, I picked the habit up. What I figured out over time should be blindingly obvious, but any use of cursing in the course of an argument/discussion makes it less and less likely that you'll convince the people you are talking to. In general, the person who doesn't lose his temper and remains calm tends to be the most convincing - almost without regard to what his position is.