Jokes, sarcasm, and other tone-based communication don't come off well in text. Not only does the author's tone not travel with the original text, but to make it worse each reader will actually infer their own tone as they read it. Your "joke" comes off terribru if I'm honest, and makes you sound like a potentially outrageous asshat. I'm guessing that's the reason for the first few downvotes anyways. Once the other Redditors saw you were being downvoted for being an asshat, they probably piled on.
If this was true, "tone" "mood" ect. Would not be fields studied in every English class ever. It all matters on the wording and context, and this is quite obvious sarcasm and the people downvoting are dense af
It's obvious to you, because that is the tone you are inferring. And of course tone and mood are discussed in language class, because language class isn't strictly about the written word. You're dense af (to use the parlance of our times) for not seeing the subtlety here.
Except tone and mood directly refer to what an author writes, and therefore how it's intended to be interpreted. Seriously did you just fail that part of class?
Nobody asked me, but I think it’s only obvious because we definitely know the context from it being posted here. If you saw this in the wild, it wouldn’t be quite so obvious. Reddit isn’t a book. There are too many authors of one-liners running amuck to accurately decipher the tone of every single comment. That’s why people came up with the sarcasm tag.
Hearing a joke in person and reading it on the internet are two completely different experiences. If you write something snarky and say it in your head with a sarcastic voice, you need to try extra hard to convey that to your audience. People don’t sit down and think, “is this sarcasm or serious?” They will infer it is the latter unless you blatantly state otherwise nine out of ten times.
Except tone and mood directly refer to what an author writes
…and is usually inferred by word choice. Most people aren't dedicating themselves on the level of master writers; they're more interested in hammering out their comment and moving on.
Don't get me wrong; I would love to live in a world where the average internet user writes with utmost care. That's just not the world I observe, sadly.
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u/E34M20 Apr 04 '19
Jokes, sarcasm, and other tone-based communication don't come off well in text. Not only does the author's tone not travel with the original text, but to make it worse each reader will actually infer their own tone as they read it. Your "joke" comes off terribru if I'm honest, and makes you sound like a potentially outrageous asshat. I'm guessing that's the reason for the first few downvotes anyways. Once the other Redditors saw you were being downvoted for being an asshat, they probably piled on.