Negative comments: 3 tactics to use when the going gets nasty

At least that’s my idea of the purpose of comments. Apparently, not everyone feels the same. During my rounds today, I found three comments on different blog posts, all of which point out mistakes by the blogs’ authors.

Some were grammatical mistakes, while others were statements or sentences that could have been written more clearly. The comments were rude. You could tell the people leaving them felt smug for spotting an error.

Now, I know that blogs should be correct and that anyone in PR who makes a grammatical error should know better.

But you know what? It happens! Get over it! Why feel the need to leave a smug comment about it?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t call people out on errors (especially if they are factual errors). Sometimes it’s a good thing. As an author, you can then correct the error and make sure you pay more attention next time.

But I don’t think it should be done rudely—and you should still add more to the conversation than just, “Oh, by the way, you’ve spelt that wrong.”

Bottom line is that mistakes do happen. The way you handle the mistake and ensuring they don’t happen again make all the difference.