Roy,


On 06/16/10 21:40, Roy Bamford wrote:
> As a native English speaker (from England) I view Jers reply as terse 
> and to the point, completely lacking in tone.

interesting.  Looking at the sentence

  "When did you point this out to devrel?"

I would like to say that while it's not impolite per se it's implicitly
saying "You _have to_ point this out to dev rel" in my ears.  A more or
less word-by-word translation to German ("Wann hast du das gegenüber
DevRel angesprochen?") would make perfect sense and carry the same
problem so I assume it's not an English language thing.  In contrast asking

  "Have you pointed this out to DevRel?  What was their reaction?"

does not seem to have this mis-hearing problem, at least not to me.


I remember a guy of the German Unix User Group (GUUG) saying something like

  "Communication is always oriented at the receiver".

Applying that to tone and avoiding mis-interpretation the sender has the
power (and arguably the responsiblity) to sounds as friendly as needed
to be sure it will not be understood as unfriendly.  In a way there's
always a way to be friendlier - _without_ faking anything.


Some of you may know ArneBab's signature saying:

  "Being unpolitical  means being political  without realizing it."

Maybe not applying tone means applying tone without realizing, too.

Best,



Sebastian