Please share your opinions, but keep 'em civil
Dr. Martin Doot of Villa Park died too young at age 60. His passing was chronicled by Eileen Daday in Tuesday's Daily Herald - a thoughtful, respectful story about the man who ran the addiction treatment program at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge.
But the first anonymous "comment" at the end of the online version story came from someone who felt compelled to make a bad joke about alcohol abuse. To their credit, the next two posters jumped all over the first writer, and our Web staff removed the first comment.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention the comment was removed after I pointed it out. Dr. Doot was a friend and colleague of my brother-in-law, Dr. Paul Feldman, who passed away a week or so earlier. I was in the process of sending the story to my sister when I discovered the snarky remark.)
Such insensitivity, unfortunately, is not uncommon online. I personally attribute it to the fact that as long as the people who comment can hide behind their anonymity, they'll say things they wouldn't dare say with their names attached. Again, personally, I wish we could change this, but it seems to be the way of the Web. The company is exploring ways to make the Web environment less hostile, but in the meantime I would encourage all online users to hit the "report abuse" button when you see comments that are malicious or abusive.
Our public forum in the print version of the Daily Herald is the Fence Post column. There, we try to keep the debate civil. It's very common, as the presidential election just gone by will attest, for people to have widely varying views, to disagree adamantly with one and other. That's fine, healthy even, but when the attacks veer off the issue and become personal, that's when we ask writers to tone down their remarks or we'll just excise the offending passage. By and large, that's what we're referring to on our opinion page when we say "letters are subject to editing." We also will tend to pare anything we know to be untrue, though I should add it's neigh on impossible to fact-check every last letter we publish.
Last week, I encouraged you to keep writing us even though the election is over. I promised a few tips on writing to Fence Post:
• Again, focus on the issues. Don't resort to name-calling, especially of other letter writers you may disagree with. But this really should apply to all. One writer attempted to call the president of the United States an "idiot." I took that word out.
• Please pay attention to spelling and grammar. Yes, we run letters through a program that checks for misspellings, knows Daily Herald and Associated Press style, and we will "clean up" bad grammar, but I can't begin to tell you how many times in the past month I fixed misspellings of the name of the next president of the United States.
• Do you realize, that when you use uppercasing and exclamation points, YOU GIVE PEOPLE THE IMPRESSION THAT YOU'RE YELLING AT THEM? Don't do it!!!! Please.
• Our guidelines to Fence Post writers also ask that they limit their essays to 300 words. Please abide by that, or we'll ask you to pare back your letter or we'll do it for you. We're not trying to stifle anyone's voice, but when we let people go on forever and a day, that keeps other people's opinions out of the paper.
Finally, a technological plea: We'll take your letter in whatever form you have - letters mailed to 4300 Commerce Court, Lisle, 60532; faxed to (630) 955-0895 - but it's a huge help when you can e-mail 'em to dpfencepost@dailyherald.com as text in the body of the e mail, rather than as an attachment.