Most commenters here are smart, thoughtful, helpful, and civil. To keep it that way, please don’t engage in any of the following:

• Personal attacks on or harsh comments to other commenters or letter-writers
• Nitpicking people’s spelling, grammar, or word choices
• Aggressively playing devil’s advocate for the hell of it
• Wildly off-topic posts (comment threads can get long and unwieldy as it is)

Also:

• Assume good faith on the part of others, including people whose opinions differ from your own. But if you conclude that someone else isn’t commenting in good faith, the best thing to do is to stop engaging with them. More about this in a minute.

• If you want a steady supply of interesting letters to read here, people need to be willing to write in and expose themselves to public critique. Treating them kindly makes that far more likely to happen.

• Be sensitive about pile-ons. If dozens of people have already criticized a letter-writer for something, it’s going to be more helpful to offer something constructive. That means that it’s useful to read or at least skim the comments before posting, especially if you’re posting something critical.

What if a fellow commenter isn’t following these rules?

The best thing you can do is to not engage, since engaging will make minor unpleasantness far worse.

If you don’t like the thought of letting something objectionable stand, a comment like “I believe you’re wrong, but I also think this whole point is derailing so I’m not going to engage” or “I don’t think that’s fair, but I don’t want to draw this out and make it the focus of the comments section” is a good approach. (But we only need one of those. A string of 15 of those isn’t helpful. So if you see a fellow commenter has already called it out, the best thing you can do is move on to more relevant, useful discussion.)

User names and avatars

Give yourself one.  It can be anything you’d like, but it’s a lot easier to follow the conversation when 10 different people aren’t all calling themselves Anonymous. You can still be anonymous; just call yourself something.

If you’d like your picture to appear next to your comments, just upload a picture at Gravatar.

Typos

Reading copyediting corrections gets very boring, so please don’t feel like you have to post comments correcting your own spelling or grammar. We believe that you know the difference between “your” and “you’re” and will just assume that your fingers typed it wrong.

Why is my comment going to moderation?

If your comment gets sent to moderation, you’ve probably triggered a spam filter (by using a particular word or phrase or by including a link, or simply because the spam filter occasionally malfunctions for a moment). If that happens, I’ll release the comment once I see it.

Alternately, and far more rarely, your comments might get sent to moderation because you haven’t respected this comment policy. You can avoid that by adhering to the above.

How can I subscribe to comments?

There are two ways to follow all the comments on a particular post:

♦ Leave a comment yourself, put your email address in the email field, and check the box that says “notify me of follow-up comments via email.”
♦ Follow the comments feed for that post by RSS. There’s a link to do that right beneath the comments box on each post.

How can I use HTML in my comments?

<b>This will make the text bold. Be sure to include the closing tag at the end!</b>

<i>This will give you italics. Again, don’t forget the closing tag.</i>

<u>You can underline</u>, or you can <del>cross things out.</del>

<blockquote>You can quote someone this way.</blockquote>

That’s it. Go forth and comment.