Susan Mitchell's Open Salon Blog

Listen, Think, Question, Learn

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 11:09:45 -0400

Listen to your detractors. You can sometimes learn more from the honesty of someone who is not trying to be your friend.

Think for yourself. "Consider the source" is generally good advice, but even bad sources sometimes make good sense.

Question everything at least once.

Learn from others, learn from your mistakes, learn from your successes, learn from observation. Always keep learning. There is always room for improvement and it is always worth trying to improve.

Next time I'll just yell "STFU!"

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 02:08:48 -0400

If you are wondering just how insane things have gotten around here, let me share this with you. I am apparently guilty of making "calm" and "measured" criticisms. I am also a "conscience-less sociopath" as evidenced by the fact that I failed to "lose [my] composure." (I am also "utterly dishonest" because I disagreed with this person's opinion, but that sort of criticism is a dime a dozen around here, and hence much less interesting.)

It never occurred to me that someone would take offense because I argued, debated, or disagreed without getting angry and losing my cool. I have tried to figure out how one answers a charge like that, but I'm pretty sure there is no response that would satisfy my detractor.

The more people are discouraged from speaking their minds, the more calls there are for particular people to be banned, the more I feel that I can't win for losing, the less worthwhile it is to be here. I always believed that the real benefit from a site such as this was the ability to get and give honest feedback, but it seems that there are now enough people here who equate "criticism" with "cruelty" or who view disagreement in any form as inappropriate, to make it risky to say anything other than "Great post!!"

Go on and feel free to be honest in comments--but only so long as you tell me what I want to hear. (That's a joke, people. Put down the knives.)

A Writer's Raw Materials

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:07:46 -0400

I am concerned.

People come to Open Salon for all sorts of reasons, but nearly all of us are here to write. You may want to be a writer (whatever that means to you) or you might just want to communicate something in writing (opinions about politics, for example, or information you find pertinent or interesting).

Regardless of why you write, the basic process is the same as any other act of creation—you turn raw materials (words) into a finished product (an article, poem, blog entry, rant). But just like that builder you hired without checking references, someone who uses the wrong materials will create an inferior—or unrecognizable—product.

Of course, you have to know what the correct materials are before you can know whether or not you are using the wrong ones. Unfortunately, some people here seem to be unaware that they are saying something quite different from what they think they are saying.

For example, I recently noticed several instances of the incorrect use of:

empathy

It was clear from the totality of the writing in each example that a dictionary is absent from these households. There also seems to be a lack of familiarity with those Interweb word-lookup thingies,* else they would have known that empathy does not, in fact, mean "indifference" or "laziness in such measure that it prevents you from getting off your ass long enough to display the slightest interest in searching out a definition." Rather, in this example, the proper word to use is:

apathy

It may seem rude to publicly point out the mistakes of others. You may consider me downright uncivil for questioning whether or not someone should entertain even a fantasy of being a "writer" if they don't have at least a passing familiarity with the meanings of the words they toss around. If you suspect that I have a solid aversion to the commission of this particular sin, then you would be justified in accusing me of expressing:

antipathy

If, on the other hand, you credit me with feeling your pain, if you believe I can relate to the embarrassment you feel at having failed to use the correct word on a site devoted (in theory, if not reality) to providing a public forum for talented and learned writers, then you should employ the word with which I began.

* on-line dic-tion-a-ries

ADDED: Yes, that is a self-portrait. And thank you to all of you who have said it is a cute picture. Personally, I think my nose is a little big ;p

To Soothe the Soul A Little Bit

Thu, 8 Jul 2010 14:07:46 -0400

This Land

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:06:14 -0400

There's no doubt that America is defined primarily by its people. It is a deservedly positive view of our nation, because we have managed to take a melange of people and cultures and make of them something approaching a unified whole—or at least a population that gets along well enough most of the time.