Month: March 2009

At the very last minute, I decided to fly out to DC (well, Crystal City, actually, which is the travel equivalent of buying a vinyl rather than a leather couch). The chance to hang out with a whole bunch of incredibly cool librarians, talk about whatever comes to mind, and do so without registering for an actual conference just doesn’t come around all that often for me, so I’m pretty thrilled.

Actually, in my better moments I’m thrilled. I think of seeing some of my best friends in the world, of joking and being serious, of eating out, and of generally doing whatever seems best to do at the time, and these things seem very very good. Then I remember that doing this requires that I do unpleasant things like pack and figure out logistics and in many other small ways step beyond my comfort zone, my routine. These things feel much less good. In my worse moments these things are nearly enough to make me question the whole prospect of the trip.

This is a pretty typical set of emotions before I travel, though, so I’m not surprised. The day before the trip I always wish I’d just decided to stay home. But then I get to the airport, through security, and up to the gate. I sit down to wait for boarding, and suddenly everything seems better. At that point all the preparations over which I have any control are done and all I have to do is go with the flow. At that point, I can blend into an anonymous crowd and watch people or daydream or read or do whatever comes to mind. At that point, the trip finally starts to feel like a good idea.

I’m looking forward to that moment. And this time I’m particularly looking forward to what comes after I reach Crystal City since I’ll get to meet some new people and reunite with some of the people who know me best. And I can’t wait to experience my very first LobbyCon.

So all in all, things are going well. And now I’ll concentrate on the glorious potential of this trip as I go out and run some errands and then pack.

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A couple of years ago Meredith Farkas wrote a post in which she introduced Josh Neff’s phrase “charitable reading” to the library blogosphere. The phrase is a good one, so it has bubbled up from time to time over the years. Essentially it means “read what people write and assume that those people meant well and that they are not stupid.” Granted, occasionally people don’t mean well, and sometimes they are stupid, but the idea is not to have those as your baseline assumptions.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last several months (two years is an eternity in blog years but not very long in human years, so I’m allowed to still be thinking about this, right?), and I think that this is only half of what makes for productive written discussion. The other half is Charitable Writing: assume that your audience is not stupid, that they mean well, that they are probably trying to do the best they can or think carefully or otherwise conduct themselves well, and that they wouldn’t be reading and interacting with you if they didn’t want to.

Lately I’ve found myself unsubscribing from blogs and twitter feeds that, even though they have potentially useful content, present ideas in ways that sound condescending. Somehow that tone of writing screams “I’m pretty sure I’m smarter than you!” so loudly that it drowns out the calm murmur of the authors’ interesting ideas. This tone forces to me to work far harder at Charitable Reading than feels fair. It eventually wears me out. And so I unsubscribe and trust that others will point me toward the truly important posts.

Charitable Reading is hard. I fail at it frequently. But I think Charitable Writing is even harder because it it requires that authors see beyond the facts that they’re conveying, step into somebody else’s head, and hear from that other person’s perspective the tone that they probably didn’t know they were conveying… and then to do this from multiple potential readers’ perspectives. With so many potential ways of failing at this kind of writing, it’s a good thing that readers will be trying to read charitably!

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