I’m sure you’re already aware of this, but you can never be told enough: when you’re blogging, emailing, or using other Internet forms of communication, you need to be careful about how you present things, because you no longer have inflections, body language, etc., at your disposal. One way to “replace” these is to use emotions :-) (but then of course there are those people who say that a well-structured sentence shouldn’t need emotions, yada yada yada…). But once upon a time I was new to email, and I learned this “be careful what you say” lesson the hard way.

I once had a “email penpal” named Nicky who lived in Australia; he was my very first penpal. After we had been writing for some time, I decided that I wanted to tell him about the funny things that had happened to us recently.

Like the time our fireplace blew up and sent glass shards flying across the living room, leaving burn marks on the carpet? (On the more serious side, it was definitely a miracle that about 15 seconds before the explosion I felt a sudden impulse to get myself and my baby brother out of the living room.)

And remember that one early morning many years ago when the house filled up with smoke because the pop-up-timer mechanism on the toaster had broken? I proudly remembered my fire drill techniques and crawled across the kitchen floor, then quickly jumped up into standing position and yanked the toaster’s power plug out. (And then my parents wake up and say something like, “Why does the house smell like smoke?”) That piece of toast was in a sorry state… (to be more specific, the slice of bread looked like greasy charcoal and had probably shrunk about 25% due to extreme moisture loss).

I never heard from Nicky again. Perhaps I gave a slight impression of pyromania…