Your opinion shouldn’t silence others

 I love to hear differences in opinions, its how you get the best opinion.

But not everyone thinks like that. 

The issue is everybody has an opinion, and no one wants to admit they’re wrong. 

Honestly, this isn’t a giant problem if the people who don’t like to hear other arguments don’t try to argue. That’s not often the case. It always seems that people with opinions they aren’t ever willing to change, start the most arguments. 

Arguments that are often aggressive and are not convincing to anyone except perhaps themselves.

I love the opinion section, I like to see what people are thinking about or talking about. There are certain types of opinion articles I think are much harder to read. 

I think articles that read like you’re being yelled at really just aren’t worth the read and I’d bet a lot of people agree with me. 

No one is trying to feel assaulted by someone’s opinion piece as they read it. 

There are a lot of different ways to write your opinion and most of them are okay.

 You can write just to be heard, to convince someone, or to criticize something. None of those things require you to write so the aggression in your argument seeps out of the page. 

I’m all for a little bit of snark or sass in an article. 

It’s always interesting to see people’s personality in their writing, it’s less interesting when you can just tell that someone seems mean. 

Now, how a person writes isn’t necessarily what they are like in person. But a good amount of the time the article and the author are pretty similar. 

Opinions easily show who we are because you don’t have to omit your bias or represent both sides. You can pick and choose your sources and the statistics you use. 

You can be blatantly wrong and still state your opinion. 

That’s the fun part of writing opinions, it is just your thoughts. 

But if your thoughts create fights and can’t be stated as something less aggressive then maybe you should reevaluate whether you should have a space to write. The opinion section is for any and everyone.

Unfortunately, I think that some people take that and run. You can express your opinion but there are some worse and some better ways to write your arguments.

You know when you’re calmly talking about a situation and then someone butts in with an aggressive opinion and completely changes the tone. It’s not a super fun experience and it very nearly completely ends any good understanding of each others points. 

That unfortunate feeling is often similar to how it feels to read some of those opinions. 

I encourage everyone to express their opinions but for those who are more inclined to get into a screaming match with a piece of paper or a word document I ask that might drink a cup of tea to calm down first. 

Think of how frustrating it is to talk to your parents when they don’t want to hear your side at all. You don’t want to talk to them about many things after that right?

The opinion pages should be a place that anyone feels comfortable expressing their opinions.

However, it stops being that place when the articles written are so aggressive that people don’t even want to read them anymore. 

You’re entitled to your opinion but you are not entitled to a space to express it.