Anyway, just wanted to comment on this:

"we do have to make sure our emotions and subtle thoughtfulness is transcribed into text."

Because you said very eloquently what I was thinking, and this appears have happened a few times now...

 I think that getting yourself, your personality and your opinions across in written form is more natural to some people than others (or maybe just seems that way) and this is definitely a skill: one that can be learned, of course.

 

I have taught writing for both business and academic purposes and in each case the focus is on effective and economical transmission of meaning, usually information but occasionally well-reasoned and rational opinion is permitted.

Is this genre of formal writing the ‘ideal’ we base our idea of online discussion on? Yes and no.  I think there are many purists who uphold a prescriptive aesthetic standard but for the rest of us our influences are less explicit.  They are no less there in the back of our minds, a distrust of the emotional, a distaste for the wordy and overblown.

Yet how can such restraint assist in the new role played by both synchronous and asynchronous online discussion?  We need it to enable human growth and development, build communities and social networks, forge and sustain friendships and support high level learning.  Such rigid austerity was appropriate when our written words accessorized who we were, but if they are to stand in for our physical presence can we afford ‘admit impediments’?

I think not and I playfully propose that we take our inspiration from another source than the business letter or academic essay.  I suggest the love letter of old is a far superior role model.  Let Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Napoleon Bonaparte, Balzac and Van Gogh be our guides.  We must insist on our right to be florid and impassioned for there is ‘not world enough and time’ for well-reasoned rationality, after all we are not asking the world for a refund, or hoping to exchange faulty goods; we are in our virtual spaces asking the world to fall to see our true self, not the mask we wear in the real world, we are asking the world to fall in love with us, our ideas, our version of reality.