Business Insight Zone

Photo by mattfoster.

People don’t like having their mistakes pointed out to them. Sure, there are times when we’re open to feedback, and ideally, if we really and truly turn into grown-ups at some point, we’re always open to feedback, because feedback is how we get better.

But back in the world of imperfect people — the world we actually inhabit — it’s hard to get people to understand when they’re wrong. Those in the wrong can take all kinds of strategies for deflection, e.g.:

• “Okay, I hear you, but that’s just your opinion.”
• “You don’t have the knowledge [experience, training] that I do in this area.”
• “You’re blinded here by your own biases.”
• “You just can’t stand to think that I’d be right about this.”
• “There you go again, attacking my ideas.”
• “You and I simply have different philosophies about this.”
• “Where did you get that data? That can’t be right.”

And so on. Seldom do we hear: “You’re right — my fundamental premise was flawed” or “You know what? I’m gonna have to completely rethink this because of the evidence you’ve showed me.” For that matter, seldom do we say it ourselves.

We humans, as a rule, are not so great about admitting that we’re wrong in public, especially when it concerns topics about which we have sermonized loudly.

Photo by Nathan Borror.

I’m thinking of this for two reasons:

1. Last week I got caught up in a blogospheric tempest-in-a-teapot, in which a blogger (who shall remain nameless) and his readers disagreed fundamentally about some of the premises he put forward in a blog post.

It doesn’t really matter what the topic was or who the blogger was, because the point is transcendent: the guy posted his thoughts specifically to stir the pot, but then once the pot got stirred — and he was presented with explicit, specific evidence that tended to undermine his broad-brush pronouncements — he dug in his heels and defended his positions all the more devoutly.

It’s not that he didn’t have a leg to stand on, or that all of his critics were correct in their own views. Rather, the blogger needed to modulate some of the over-the-top rhetoric in his post, or at least to acknowledge that he was making generalizations that were broadly true (which they were) but not universally true (as he kept trying to assert).

Myself, I left a detailed comment offering some specific criticisms, then kept checking to see if the blogger would respond. He never did, and I let myself get worked up about it.

And here’s the thing: Who cares? The guy was wrong in some of what he said, but he’s (a) successful in his field, (b) correct, in broad outline, about some of his points, and (c) obviously unwilling to review his basic theses in light of what his commenters were trying so hard to tell him. The grown-up response to all of this, best I can tell, is “Eh, so what?” Let him be wrong. He’ll go his way, I’ll go mine, and we can both still have success and help others along the road.

The moral: I’ve got better things to do than to correct someone who’s not open to correction — especially when there are so many things about which I need correction.

Photo by ninjapoodles.

2. Recently a friend on Twitter called me to task — ever-so-gently, mind you — for acting peevish about others’ gaffes of spelling, grammar, and usage. I hadn’t realized that I was making so many of these comments out in the Twitterverse, but I guess I was. These are the kinds of things I’m talking about:

• When you’re praising what someone says, it’s not “Here, here,” but “Hear, hear.” It comes from an old British usage, “Hear him! Hear him!” — something like what you still hear in certain Christian churches when a parishoner hollers out, “Preach it!”
• It seems that I constantly come across misuse of “its,” either because people mistake the contraction of “it is” (it’s) for the possessive of “it” (its), or because they commit the abomination [wink] of tacking an apostrophe onto the end of the possessive form (its’). I shudder.
• In general, people put way too many apostrophes before “s” in words that are not possessive and that don’t include acronyms or numbers (e.g. “the 1950’s” or “learning the ABC’s”).
• Constantly — constantly — I encounter misuse of “I” for “me,” as in, “They threw a party for Michael and I.” Again, the horror of it all unsettles me.

Maybe I’m more sensitive to these issues because I grade a lot of undergraduate papers. Surely I’m more sensitive to them because I share the dominant copy-editorial “gene” possessed by every member of the Hoover’s editorial department (not to mention the copy desks of every newspaper in the country). And no doubt all of this intrudes on my attention because I read so many blogs and tweets and e-mails, which have made published writers out of a far larger slice of the population than ever before.

Also, by the way, I do have a deeper motivation than my own tastes to hope for a better grasp of usage: We get a finer-grained experience of a thing when we know more about it. This includes, by all means, the English language.

Given how many people are writing for public consumption these days, we all benefit when we use the language better. There’s far more richness in “Hear, hear” than in its misspelled, mis-perceived replacement “Here, here,” because it connects us to a deep history of English-language oratory. In my world, that’s a good thing.

And yet, if you want to be seen as the original jack– jerk, just correct the usage of an educated person. Go ahead, do it out in public where everybody can see it, and see what it gets you. (In my own defense, I never call out people publicly for poor usage.) The reality is that, even though more of us are communicating via the written word than ever before, most of us still aren’t — and never will be — professional wordsmiths like the aces who staff copy desks or my company’s editorial department. And that’s okay.

The moral: Let people communicate in their own way. Let it be l33t-speak, if that’s what they can manage and it’s suitable for the audience. Let the jargon flow. Let a hundred misspellings bloom. Not because these faults are unimportant, but because there’s seldom anything to be gained socially by correcting them. And communication is inherently social.

Okay, if by some chance your friend keeps saying “fa-KADE” instead of “fa-SAAD” when she’s trying to say “facade,” give her the pointer in private, maybe over lunch or something. If your junior at work is embarrassing himself with the misspellings in his e-mails, maybe you can give him a gentle nudge in the right direction, out of the public view. But in general, let it go and embrace what people are saying even when how they’re saying it is faulty.

Photo by victoriapeckham.

Believe me, whether we’re talking about ideas or the mechanics of expressing them, these things are tough for me to let go. And if I’m deciding whether to hire you to write for Hoover’s, you can be sure I won’t let them go. But except for those rare cases when I have a burning need to answer the question, “Does this person care as much about usage as I do?,” anointing myself Defender of Everything Correct just isn’t worth the grief.

When it comes to correcting people online, especially people you don’t know in person . . . well, XKCD nailed it better than I ever could with this cartoon.