Why I don’t (or rarely) reply to reader comments

Last updated on: October 29, 2013 at 8:37 am by Jane the Actuary

Why I don’t (or rarely) reply to reader comments 2013-10-29T08:37:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So I was thinking about this the other day — comments are great because you know that a live person is reading what you’ve written and engaging with your ideas, but I hardly ever comment back. This is why:

1) For reasons that I’m not clear on, but I think may have to do with cookies, even though I’ve told blogger not to count my own pageviews in its pageview totals, it does so anyway, at least sometimes. And, since I have so view pageviews in the first place, I don’t want to “corrupt” the pageview counter by adding artificial pageviews.

2) I worry that if I reply to every comment, I’ll look desparate for readers. Which I am, but I don’t want you guys to think that.

3) I’m generally not a confrontational person, and don’t want to get into arguments.

4) I tend to write a post before starting work, or at lunch or in the evening, but periodically through the day peek at blogger to see if there are any new comments — which means I have enough time for a 1-minute break, but not to click through to the post itself and start typing. And often enough I’m looking at the iPad, and — I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t type on the iPad to save my life.

So that’s it. I just thought I should put this out there.

(Did you ever notice, by the way, that “you guys” is Midwesternese for y’all? And waiters and waitresses who say “Can I get you guys something to drink?” are not being inappropriately informal but just using the “2nd person plural” form of address, which only exists, in the American Midwest, in an informal form. And then there’s the 2nd person plural posessive — you guys’s or y’all’s — which, although clumsily, responds to a need for a grammatical from which “textbook” English doesn’t have.)

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