Are you telling your audience to shut up?

Whether interacting with Facebook fans or speaking to a live audience, beware of these eight behaviors that snuff out robust conversations.

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I understand that Facebook is faceless, and even if you know the person whose post you’re commenting on, you are not speaking into someone’s face. You are not looking into their eyes, and you’re not in their physical presence and able to read their body language and understand their reaction to your words.

However, I’m guessing that people who are aggressive communicators on Facebook are probably aggressive in person as well. Let’s talk about the many ways that people stifle conversation instead of cultivating it, using examples from Facebook comments I’ve read in online news articles.

1. Ask a question that you don’t want answered. Read my post about rhetorical questions here.

“What ever happened to journalistic integrity—the who, what, when, where, and why of the facts and theories without conjecture and assertions?”

2. Attack with language.

This includes name-calling, labeling, attacking the person instead of disagreeing with their ideas, saying things like, “Why don’t you…?” “You should just…”

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