difference

Advice vs. Opinion

August 20, 2010 By Mark 7 Comments

My brother tells a funny story about someone coming to him for help. He politely listened to the person explain their situation, which went on forever, then gave his take. At which point the person turned on him like a lunatic and screeched, “I asked for your opinion, not your advice!”

In the aftermath of that anecdote I broke the concepts down to discern the difference between the two, and hopefully protect myself from a similar experience. Here’s the entire difference between opinion and advice:

Opinion = “This is what I think.”
Advice = “This is what I think you should do.”

That’s it. That’s the whole difference between telling someone your opinion and having the effrontery to give unsolicited advice.

I mention this because a peer had a similar run-in with someone in a professional context. While there’s no way to protect yourself from crazies, you can cut down on the likelihood that someone will take offense by framing everything from your own point of view:

If I was in your shoes…
If that happened to me…
I know how I’d feel if…
That happened to me once, and…
In my own experience…

That sort of thing. Whatever observations you want to make in reply, make them about yourself. There’s literally no difference in what you’re saying, but for some people it seems to make a big difference.

And in a business context, that could make a difference to you.

— Mark Barrett

Proofreading Scripts vs. Fiction

June 28, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the previous post, which also concerned proofreading, I said this:

While I certainly don’t want typos in my milestone drafts, a typo in a script feels like less of a crime simply because a script is a blueprint, not a finished work. When I really came to terms with the fact that I would be producing a finished product with my name on it, my level of concern (and vanity) about typos markedly increased. Where I previously felt that typos in a script were unprofessional, I suddenly felt as if typos in my short story collection would be a personal criticism of me.

I don’t disagree with those statements, but in the intervening days I’ve come to realize that I completely missed the main difference between proofreading a script (screenplay, stage play, interactive script) and proofing prose fiction. It’s not simply that scripts are blueprints while fiction is finished work. It’s that the density and complexity of fiction is infinitely greater than anything you will find in a script, precisely because the availability of techniques is so much greater. [ Read more ]