The But And of a Community Post

Curse you, Letters

Sanya Weathers, former community weenie at EA Mythic and currently writing over at Massive Gamer Magazine, popped up a nice little recent piece about the value of wording responses in a way to subtly elicit the response you want. Basically, the crux is that the word “but” is a negation of whatever is before the but, which gives off the idea that you’re being disingenuous.

So instead of “but”, you use “and”, which I’m sure makes perfect sense in PR-land.

For those who don’t know, PR-land is a magical place where if you sound like you’re telling the truth, you probably are, and the rest you can gleefully sweep to the side or cover up in mounds and mounds of hype and big, sweeping statements like “a truly epic experience” and “the success of our massive subscriber base drives our continuing passion for excellence”. It sounds positively grand, right?

Anyway, I will definitely have to incorporate this little trick into my daily interactions. I’m sure it will produce the desired results:

-”Please stop ranting and kicking your feet on our forums. We have a great deal of respect for the different opinions presented, and we’d rather you not post something that looks like you haven’t had your afternoon nap.”

-”I meant to turn in that analysis and budget request on time, and if I wasn’t inundated with so much wonderful extra stuff since my fellow team members fail at competance I could have done it, and more!”

-”To be honest, I really meant to shoot the rifle so that the bullet went to the SIDE of their backside to give them a good scare – and when I pulled the trigger it just happened to recoil just like so…”

I can see the appeal already.