Ryan, I substantially disagree and actually think all of your suggested alternatives are worse. The original is reporting on a response to the writing, not staking out a claim to an objective assessment of it.
I think that reporting honest responses is one of the best tools we have for dealing with emotional inferential gaps—particularly if it’s made explicit that this is a function of the reader and writing, and not the writing alone.
I’ve discussed this with Owen a bit further. How emotions relate to norms of discourse is a tricky topic but I personally think many people would agree on the following pointers going forward (not addressed to Fluttershy in particular):
Dos:
flag your emotions when they are relevant to the discussion. e.g. “I became sick of redrafting this post so please excuse if it comes across as grumpy”, or “These research problems seem hard and I’m unmotivated to try to work more on them”.
discuss emotional issues relevant to many EAs
Don’ts:
use emotion as a rhetorical boost for your arguments (appeal to emotion)
mix arguments together with calls for social support
mix arguments with personal emotional information that would make an EA (or regular) audience uncomfortable.
Of course, if you want to engage emotionally with a specific people, you can use private messages.
Ryan, I substantially disagree and actually think all of your suggested alternatives are worse. The original is reporting on a response to the writing, not staking out a claim to an objective assessment of it.
I think that reporting honest responses is one of the best tools we have for dealing with emotional inferential gaps—particularly if it’s made explicit that this is a function of the reader and writing, and not the writing alone.
I’ve discussed this with Owen a bit further. How emotions relate to norms of discourse is a tricky topic but I personally think many people would agree on the following pointers going forward (not addressed to Fluttershy in particular):
Dos:
flag your emotions when they are relevant to the discussion. e.g. “I became sick of redrafting this post so please excuse if it comes across as grumpy”, or “These research problems seem hard and I’m unmotivated to try to work more on them”.
discuss emotional issues relevant to many EAs
Don’ts:
use emotion as a rhetorical boost for your arguments (appeal to emotion)
mix arguments together with calls for social support
mix arguments with personal emotional information that would make an EA (or regular) audience uncomfortable.
Of course, if you want to engage emotionally with a specific people, you can use private messages.