Perhaps I should write worse?
I am Brazilian and I have used software to assist me in writing both English and Portuguese since I the 1990s. That was a great boost to my learning process, as I could see the corrections made to my writing and incorporate them in my writing. I also enjoy concoting sentences that feel correct and proper.
However, writing this way has disavantages.
First, when I write correct English, readers will assume that I am a native English speakers, generally American. This comes with a lot of baggage and expectations for the interpretion of sophisticated context which I lack. When I fail to conform to those expectations I am met with hostility. At that point it is useless to disclose my nationality, since the bad vibes are already set.
Second, formal and properly written paragraphs give the impression that I think too highly of myself, that I wish to give more weight to my ideas than they really have (someone was aggressive to me because I used the word "ontological" once...). Much of the world prefers the informal mode of communication which I personally find unpleasant. But bad interactions are way more unpleasant. So perhaps I shoud change the way I write to be intentionally informal and a little improper. That way everyone will understand that I am not a native English speaker and also that I do not believe that my ideas are inherently superior to everyone else's. Also, a little bit of error prevents people from thinking I am an AI.
I did not proofread this post and I feel ashamed. Maybe it is for the best.
Please, be yourself. There will always be someone to unfairly judge you. We live in a world in which periods or saying you're welcome can be seen as aggressive. Worry only if people misunderstand your message and almost never for aesthetic reasons.
I get what you mean. I think a lot of it depends on context. Some places, websites, and spaces have a more casual vibe, so rolling in with perfect grammar and exquisite vocabulary will be seen as different, even if it's not actually wrong or bad. I think it takes a lot of skill to sound casual and informal in a language, because it shows that you are comfortable enough with the language to know when to break the rules. It's something that native speakers don't have to really think about because they have a lifetime of picking up on social cues about when to use slang and when not to. Meanwhile you're second guessing yourself and how you sound because you don't want to come across in a different way.
If it makes you feel any better, I've come across your posts many times on tildes, and never noticed you weren't a native English speaker (if you mentioned it before then I totally missed it, sorry).
Thanks!
In reality, I think I sound too much like a native speaker, so readers expect me to be aware of contexts I am not a part of. So perhaps, if I wrote more like a foreigner (which I will if I don't proofread or use any external tools), they will more easily understand that I am ignorant of a lot of thing that are specific to the US and other English speaking countries.
Can you provide an example? Not doubting you, just trying to understand a bit better.
This is an old one. I used the word "lynching" to describe something and someone observed that I was being insensitive because this word has a specific history in the United States. Ironically, I was (and am) Black :P
Ahh gotcha. To be fair, I bet there's tons of Americans that don't know the origins of that word. A lot of what you've described in this thread still happens to native speakers too, so I wouldn't sweat it too much, though I do understand your frustrations. Just know that half of all communication is done on the receiving end, and sometimes there's not much you can do when the other side is unwilling or unable to understand what you're trying to say.
I love your writing, lou.
I don’t want to override your experiences or worries here, but I genuinely don’t think you need to change a thing.
You have a particular style and command of language that suits you. You’re concise and precise in ways that my meandering, clumsy writing self wishes I could be.
Yours are comments I always look for in our topics here, because I always feel like you give good insights.
If changing your writing is meaningful to you, then definitely go for it, but if it’s predicated primarily on the idea that you’ve gotten some bad responses, well, then, maybe that’s on us for not giving you enough good ones.
Hopefully this comment can be a start.
As always, these are very kind words. I think you are a kind person. It is very difficult for me to think of my way of writing as self expression or something I must preserve. I am the son of old-school journalists and, to me, sentences are meant to be carved. They have a purpose, they achieve something that is not intrinsic personal. Like my parents did on the newspapers they worked. With a journalistic work ethic, so to speak.
That said, I do believe that I have a fondness for formality. It is something that gives me pleasure and structure.
Perhaps, given that I am not a journalist, I should do without the journalistic work ethics, so to speak.
These days I am in love with the word "perhaps". I keep deleting it when I see it, but I don't know, I like the sound of it. Perhaps I will keep using it even though some will find me pedantic for it.
Thanks ;)
From another Portuguese speaker: I like the way you write in a context like Tildes. I don't find it problematic at all.
It seems counter-intuitive, but if you were writing a novel, and you wanted it to have broad appeal, I'd say absolutely do simplify your writing. When having a productive online discussion, even though the context is less formal, I actually prefer a more diverse vocabulary, for clarity.
English was not my first language, nor am I American, but I empathize quite heavily with this.
I think what I'm hearing from you is that the expectation gap in a reader create a kind of misread of your writing as arrogance, and the resulting misunderstanding is creating hostility which causes distress. First off, if we had previously interacted and I was insensitive please let me apologize. :)
My guess is that this is why a lot of other women pepper their writing and their speech with phrases like I think.... probably...maybe...I'm not sure but...I heard from somewhere...as far as I know....if I recall correctly... Because our being sure of our facts and opinions invite hostility. And that we tend to hide behind "we / our / my school / the company" when we talk about our accomplishments, because when we use first person lanaguge to talk about accomplishments we are sometimes met with hostility.
And this is also probably why so many posts online begin with "as a woman / immigrant / old person / highschooler / non-American" etc.
And also why I put a ton of unneeded punctuation in my writing, and I am constantly wrestling with adding unneeded kaomoji ( '3' ) or slang abbreviations (lol) even here.
I think perhaps dumbing yourself down is going too far, but perhaps there are subtle tone hints in text that native speakers include to "soften" the language somehow. ?
Overall, though, I want to affirm that hostility is not acceptable, and that you're not responsible for other people behaving poorly. The above advice is for "defensive writing/speaking" that could possibly maybe probably reduce some friction, but I am not suggesting that one should expect abuse without using those tactics.
Edit : Ah darn, the deleted msg was me, double posting because I was in an elevator I think. Sorry all. Just wanted to say so in case we're wondering if someone said something mean and it got deleted. Love you lou, don't change please
This is a habit I’ve picked up even as a guy for the same reasons, more so on the internet than in real life interactions. Making a statement without couching it sufficiently seems like it’s taken as an invitation to attack in many spaces.
I don’t dispute at all that it happens to women more frequently, though.
This is called "hedging" in linguistics, and while there are both gendered and cultural differences in how it's used and how often, it's nigh-universal in some form or another. Hedging can have a lot of utility in certain ways! Epistemic hedges (listed under the "Using hedges" section in the linked wikipedia article) are frequently when one wants to make it clear that there are sources of uncertainty for them and that they're open to the possibility that they're wrong or missing some information.
Some languages take evidentiality seriously-miş:
Oh yeah, evidentiality is cool af and I wish I spoke a language that used it! There are languages that distinguish between whether you know something because you witnessed it or through hearsay or because you saw evidence of it, and there are even some that distinguish between how you witnessed it (iirc the distinction is usually whether you saw it or witnessed it through other senses).
I find myself doing the same thing. Not as strongly as the examples, but padding things enough that it is clear it is my opinion, based on what I know, etc.
Even on Tildes I've found it to be more effective in having more grounded reasonable conversations.
:) I can see the "seasoning" in this brief response. It's like the typing version of defensive driving; if it makes the digital commute a little less stressful, I'm happy for it too.
I've got a couple thoughts about that based on my own experiences. ymmv.
First, the very reason I came here from Reddit during the API fiasco was because I was sick of writings posts where replies would almost always adopt the most bizarre interpretation of my ideas no matter how carefully I hedged (of which 'softening' is a type) or considered other perspectives. Many others tended to assume that I was writing in bad faith. What you describe above could be a bit of that rather than your written English proficiency, which is clearly C2, so you're fine on that front.
Also, some people don't respond well to the use of formal language. If you're getting negative reactions from that then I think that's just a universal of attaining a high degree of education. We all have to switch in and out of specialized language (or 'group jargon') depending on who we're communicating with... which is never really clear on the Internet. That might sound elitist, but any specialist has to do the same thing whether it be a mechanic, a medical doctor, or a teacher discussing pedagogy with parents or students.
What if instead of writing “worse,” you thought of it as experimenting with more informal styles of writing?
There are many ways to write English. What sort of writing would you like to imitate?
Lots of people are offering opinions here along the lines of “you’re excellent, don’t worry about it” and I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.
But also, if you’re still looking for solutions after seeing the support people are offering here, I have an idea which might be a little sneaky, but may achieve what you want.
My suggestìon is to keep doing what you’re doing, but once you’ve got your comment complete and ready to post, just go back and alter one or two words to add diacritics to words where it might almost make sense that your native language keyboard tripped up and added it where it wasn’t needed.
This won’t change the content of your carefully constructed comments, but will provide a subtle indicator that implies you might not be a native speaker, even if your ideas and sentence structure are otherwise infallible.
I feel like this might be the text-equivalent to having a slight accent when you speak out loud — you may still have excellent ideas and perfectly constructed sentences, but if your pronunciation is just a little bit different, native speakers will pick up on that.
In an attempt to “show, don’t tell” I’ve followed my own advice here and popped in a nonsense diacritic or two in my comment before I pressed send. Points for if you spot it, and bonus points if you spotted it the first time around and didn’t need this paragraph to prompt you to go back through the comment and search for it.
I initially thought «man, that's like a lie by omission». But then I noticed that I could totally spot germanophone people because of their quotation mark („...“). And then I got curious and saw in the Wikipedia page that it's more of an eastern/northern European thing.
But sometime the context isn't right for quotes... Maybe it's a good time to follow non-english typographical rules !
As a Dutch person looking at that page I have to wonder how accurately it reflects reality. It puts
„...”and‚...’in the primary column. I am looking at my keyboard and wouldn't even know how to type them. It is possible that in high school this was mentioned at some point, but as far as I know most people just do"..."and'...'. Sometimes the typographic ones:“...”and‘...’. But almost always both quotation marks at the top of line.In French too it's awkward to type but it gets autoreplaced by your word processor. What's the situation in proper publication (journal, government communication, etc) ?
Journals I didn't check, but, I did check a few government (related) websites. There it seems the standard is to use the typographic
“...”and‘...’.Checking some news websites it also appears that they tend to go for all quotation marks in the top line.
Possibly a bit too subtle for an indicator as I didn't notice this upon first reading or even when I scanned back through after reaching your last paragraph. What I did notice first up was that you used an em dash instead of a hyphen, but that's more a sign of someone who cares about punctuation than foreignness.
The fact that the comment says "a nonsense diacritic or two" makes me think I've picked up on the wrong thing, but I did notice that @ThrowdoBaggins used the single quote instead of the apostrophe (e.g., "I’ve" instead of "I've").
Edit: ChatGPT spotted it immediately. I think that the "opposite" diacritic would have been much more noticeable.
Ah, I revised that comment a few times before I hit send, but only intended for there to be one in the final comment, so “diacritic or two” was missed in the ultimate review.
For what it’s worth, that quote instead of apostrophe is just the default of my iPhone’s soft keyboard for all apostrophes. I wonder if it’s something to do with language being set to Australian English?
Edit: For completeness, here’s the solution below.
Spoiler: describes the hidden diacritic
In the third paragraph, “suggestìon” uses a backtick instead of a dot for the i
With an em dash, these days, I find that I tend to assume someone might have used an LLM to be honest. Must be something that's very prevalent in the training data as it tends to pop up excessively in LLM written text.
Ah, alas, I guess I’ll have to adjust my writing style across the wider internet; I don’t really want to look like a bot.
For the most part, I think I can usually substitute a semicolon where a single em-dash would sit, but I’m fond of using them in pairs — to break away from the topic and then come back — and I can’t really get the same effect with brackets (especially if all my thoughts come with bonus thoughts (and then you just have too many brackets all over the place)).
I probably should have put a bit more nuance in my statement. It is more as @Promonk says, if the entire writing feels a bit "off" and I see em dashes I might consider an LLM being involved. If the rest of the comment still makes sense as far as the actual content goes I'll assume good faith and just that someone used an LLM for writing feedback.
Gboard includes an em dash—it's incredibly easy to type—so there's no real reason to assume it came from an LLM. I use them all the time
I feel like you are replying out of context of what I already wrote.
Just to clarify further, in general the use of em dashes is not all that common. In fact, I'd say it is relatively rare in online conversations to be used.
Compared to that, the text generated by LLMs makes heavy use of em dash. To the point that, in combination with other factors, it becomes an indicator.
So, to me, together with other factors it actually is a reason to suspect a LLM might be involved. And for me, depending on context and circumstances, can just be an observation not a judgement overall.
As someone who both uses GBoard and frequently uses em dashes in my writing online (albeit usually written with a double hyphen for ease), I didn't even know that you could type an em dash itself using GBoard until reading this comment. So I think it suffices to say that proper em dashes still aren't super commonly used by most people online.
That's probably because the only reason someone would even know em dashes are a thing anymore–let alone how they're supposed to be used–is because said person has had some training in journalism or one of the other defined writing styles. I never got any proper training in style until college, and even then I might have missed em dashes altogether if I hadn't joined the school newspaper.
Don't worry. If what you're saying makes sense, no one worth listening to will think you're a bot. Strive for clarity in both thinking and style, and your humanity will show through.
Dropping the word 'fuck' in every once in a while helps too.
Okay, I wasn’t sure if I was going too subtle with only one, and a small inconspicuous one at that. I thought slamming in a few ñ characters might have been a bit on the nose so decided to go for something less obvious.
For completeness, here’s the solution below.
Spoiler: describes the hidden diacritic
In the third paragraph, “suggestìon” uses a backtick instead of a dot for the i
This sounds like the other person you're writing to is an asshole. Hostility in any format is never acceptable. When someone responds to me with hostility, either verbally or in writing, I'm able to remain calm and accept that I am not the right person to calm them down. I then address my concerns with someone else. (As an example, a sales person for a home improvement project called me a liar after the completed project did not include everything that was agreed on. I voiced my concerns, let him continue to argue with me, and didn't fight back. Shortly after I got in touch with a manager and they made it right.)
If the context of this is a work environment, I'm sorry you have to put up with that.
Can I ask if the name you use when you are communicating in writing makes it obvious that you are of Portuguese descent? There are pros and cons to clearly presenting your ethnicity, but in this case it might help. Basic business communication training (in the United States at least) includes suggestions for how to communicate with non-native English speaker. As an example, one of them is to avoid using idioms like "You knocked it out of the park." (If you are unfamiliar, this specific idiom is a baseball-related phrase which means "you did a great job.")
As far as purposefully altering your writing to attempt to conform to an unknown set of expectations, I wouldn't bother. When it comes to business emails, the only thing I try to do is stay brief, as people will sometimes refuse to read long emails. Outside of that, I speak as professionally as possible, and it leaves a positive impression on the clients I work with.
This is so relatable! I'll follow your example and not correct or use the dictionary for this comment, because I almost always do when I post more than just a few sentences here on tildes. It feels like a lot more effort to do that than necessary, maybe more than most others put in? Tildes does have a completely different context like @fefellama says. If people here are familiar with my comments and posts they might expect certain things from me but comparing here to chatting on discord or just how I sound in real life, you'd think I was a completely different person and that I'm an idiot haha
Pretty sure the technical term for it is code-switching, e.g. how you speak to your boss is different than how you might speak to your child. Tildes is a very welcoming and wholesome place overall, so it makes sense that the type of discussion that thrives here is different than the stuff you'd see elsewhere on the internet.
Edit: also, it would make sense that non-native speakers have some troubles with this, since it usually requires a lot more familiarity with a language to know the subtleties of when and where to switch your tone, vocabulary, and grammar.
What I would say, is don't see it as writing "worse". "Proper" is not better or worse. The point of writing is not to satisfy arbitrary rules - it's to communicate. Writing with proper capitalization, a diverse vocabulary, and all the punctuation rules is NOT better than writing without all that. its jsut different, it communicates different things
its alla bout what the words imply, less punctuation, no caps, simple words - thats a more casual vibe. if the goal is present language that puts other people at ease then this is actually beter.
On the other hand, if you're writing a formal complaint, it's much more effective to "write correctly". You seem more intelligent, colder.
So
one isn't more correct than the other. It's just different. Different things for different purposes.
From my perspective it's about intent, if you're writing a certain way to project intelligence or make up for insecurity then it's worth considering changing your writing.
If it's just how you communicate, and the majority of readers understand you, don't worry about it.
You definitely seem to be in the latter group, and I personally appreciate love of language and written communication. Don't change anything!
I sometimes think that it works like a bonus filtration method. People who are intimidated by fluent use of language usually have a particular set of issues that I'm quite happy not to have in my life. When they enthusiastically identify themselves I like to think it's best for everyone concerned!
Note that I'm referring to people who are upset by it, not people who aren't great with language arts, I have nothing against them.
Even if you were a native speaker born and raised in the US you would still run into similar issues. Even within the US there are rather big cultural differences many people are barely aware of. This only gets worse as this is the internet where context is often lacking, and many people operating on assumptions rather than clarifications.
As far as your second concern goes. You could put some effort writing in a more casual style. But it also entirely depends on the context. Some people will just take issue with anyone who writes/talks differently from them. And, again, this is the internet where there is also a demographic group that is distinctly anti-intellectual and takes issue with anyone who has a marginally bigger vocabulary available to them.
In some cases writing something in a slightly different style could help. I know I do adjust my writing depending on my audience. Sometimes down to the person I am communicating with if I have had previous interactions with them.
Having said all that, your writing sometimes is a bit formal, but I wouldn't say it is over the top. You don't seem to be the sort of person who fancies themselves a wordsmith, has a thesaurus on their desk and puts lots of efforts in constructing grammatically complex structures to be clever. To me, you simply come across as someone who puts care and attention in what they write.
I'd say that if people take issue with that it is their problem and loss, not yours.
Edit:
Something else that later came to mind. Often it doesn't matter what you write exactly, because many people do not actually read what they respond to. They skim over what you wrote, or read it but don't take the time to internalize it. The end result is the same, a reply based on their own abstraction/assumption of what you wrote.
This varies per person and I think everyone does it in a while, but some people seem to have elevated this to an art form. Certainly on the internet, yes also on Tildes, I see this happen annoyingly regularly.
If it is incidental, from someone who otherwise has shown to be a capable comprehensive reader it sometimes helps to make a friendly remark. But that is rare, more often than not it is a blind spot of people and I try to take it as a sign to tap out of a conversation.
I've noticed sometimes that ESL speakers, when writing, tend to have a very "flowery" style that can come across as pretentious or eccentric if one assumes they're a native speaker. However, successfully imitating a native speaker writing in a casual style will be difficult. If your tendency is towards floweriness and verbosity, will you be believable trying to imitate another style?
I think it's only worth trying if it's for your own personal interest and fun, and NOT to avoid conflict. Remember the misunderstanding and language barriers goes both ways - maybe people don't mean to come across to you as being very hostile but you're perceiving it that way. That's the charitable reading of the situation.
I'm a native speaker and people online are constantly misinterpreting me anyway, so at a certain point you have to let go and either ignore it or find amusement in people's willingness to get bent out of shape over nothing. It's really their own personal failing, and not yours, to get so mad about someone else's writing style.