Praise in Public, Criticize in Private

If you’ve ever experienced a twitter fight you know how hilarious they can be. People go back and forth saying things they don’t mean, just so they can win a fight they don’t care about. The intentions are usually good though, people just genuinely want to share their side. However, with the way society has taught us to handle media we’ve lost sight of the proper way to share correction. We rather attack, not understanding that what we say and how we say it, can have dire consequences.

So much good can be done through correction. It offers the ability to be better! However, how you deliver your message is almost as important as the message itself. In twitter fights people rarely think before they post. People just want to be right, but in reality, what they say makes them look stupid and the person they’re criticizing feel stupid too. Taking correction and even giving it is already difficult, but it’s a hundred times worse when it’s available for the whole world to see. When you criticize publicly it puts the focus on what you did wrong rather than how we can get better as content creators and consumers. When you take care in how you correct people, it allows both parties to grow. Imagine all the good we could do if we would stop attacking people on the internet. Not only would they be better, but us too. It would save us from a lot of emotional distress and protect us from a bad digital shadow following us.

So, I encourage you to praise publicly and criticize privately. When  you do this, you’re able to provide correction so that people can focus on getting better at their craft, rather than focus on picking up the messy pieces of the embarrassment they just experienced.