Tailor Made

 To tailor:  to fashion or adapt to a particular taste, purpose, or need.

Here is the essence of rhetoric:  to tailor your words to fit a specific audience’s specific taste, purpose, or need.  This tailoring is the crux of language.  In order to write, a person must know to whom they are writing and what the purpose of his or her writing is.  Why is it important?  Because (besides body language) the only form of expression and communication people have is … words. 

Unless a person is writing words is diary form, there is an audience.  And let’s not kid ourselves, even a diary is sometimes read by other people.  (Diary of Anne Frank… and a hundred other examples here)  When a person puts words to paper (or words to twitter or facebook or Instagram or reddit, or whatever) other people are going to read those words.  If you have a diary, and (god forbid) you die, your parents, friends, and significant others are going to read your diary.  Other people will read the words you write.  Even if you are speaking, chances are, other people are listening.  They might remember, record, or even screen-shot your words. 

Listen: 

Be careful.  People are listening.

Every person who hears or reads any words has a personal filter, through which they interpret those words.  It doesn’t matter what your intent was, if other people don’t understand what you are saying.  The ultimate objective is to be heard in the way which you intended to be heard.  When a writer of anything (fiction, nonfiction, tweets, posts, instant messages, or emails) writes something, the sole objective is to be heard in the manner in which they are speaking.  So very often, communication is misinterpreted.  We may have the most genuine of intentions, but if our tone is ambiguous, the recipient doesn’t know exactly what we mean to say.  Obviously, language is extremely important.  Sometimes, we can fool other people simply by the way we look (professional, cute, sexy, indifferent), but the bottom line with language is that when an individual cannot present themselves in person, we are left with the impression their words leave us. 

Never underestimate the power of words.

Think about all of the things you have read, and consider how those things affected you.  How does a “twitter war” get started?  With words.  Somebody says something argumentative or ambiguous or hateful, and the volley ensues.  Back and forth – he said, she said.  The words, the language, snowballs into gossip and confrontations and hearsay.  Very likely, no one wins in a twitter war, because no one is really listening.  They puke their words onto a social medium and think it’s done. 

Listen:

It’s never done.

Everything a person says or does in America 2015 is likely to be heard, repeated, and judged.  Never think that you are simply spewing words into cyberspace, because other people are out there, bored out of their skulls, looking for something to retweet or repost.  The unseen minions are working overtime.

This may sound Big Brother-ish, but it’s plain and simple truth.  What a person puts on the internet in 2015 will forever remain a part of the internet until death do us part.  Words are irrevocable.  Even if those words are said in the sanctity of a break up in your basement, the person to who you said those words will remember what you said and how you said it and how it made them feel.

Be careful. 

With language comes power.