Last week, I tried to post something on social media from my phone, and I thought I’d accidently typed a new emoji that I didn’t recognize. This would not be surprising. Emoji is not my first language. And social media is not my home world.
I deleted the tweet, because I didn’t want to send some kind of crude message without realizing it. A few hours later, people started complaining on social media because their phones where doing the same thing. Whew. Don’t you love it when you find out you aren’t the only one being socially awkward?
Evidently, some Apple iphones had developed a glitch. When users tried to type the letter “I”, the software replaced the letter with a box containing a question mark. It looked weird, in case you didn’t see one.
My solution was simple. I edited all my texts, messages, and posts. I’m a writer, after all. I can find different ways to say things and thereby avoid using the offending personal pronoun.
And this is where Apple did us all a big favor. In the four sentence paragraph above, three sentences start with the letter “I.” Every few minutes, every single day, this little glitch reminded me how many times I come first.
Facebook posts. Tweets. Instagram captions. Chats with my friends. And, probably, in all the real-life encounters, too. If “I” starts all my social media posts, she probably dominates most of my other thoughts, too.
This editing and revising has been good for my soul. It has forced me to rearrange my words and my thinking in ways that put other phrases and faces first.
That should be good for all of us, don’t you think?
So, thank you, Apple. I hope this is a permanent fix in me. Now, excuse me while I go download the software update that fixes this annoying glitch in my phone!!!!
Oh, Kathy! What a fantastic take-away from that brief but bewildering glitch! Makes me think differently about “1st world” problems! I, me, my, first…
Indeed it does!
When that story was posted, the link was shared in our QA group at work. We’re all thankful that wasn’t our “miss” in testing. While reading the story, it came to my mind that it would be a good writing exercise to try writing without a capital you-know-what letter. This made me think of you and the Guild. Happy thoughts were in my head when the link came through showing you had written about the glitch.
Whew! The post was successfully completed by yours-truly with no actual usage of you-know-what. Woohoo! Who needs active voice when passive works just fine? LOL
Isn’t that the truth?! As much as avoiding the pronoun, the struggle becomes doing so in active voice!
That’s a next-level exercise. I’ll do that in the re-write. Editing to active voice is much easier than writing it all that way in the rough draft.