My colleague says my LinkedIn post is unacceptable. I don’t understand why

A senior person at the organisation I work for told me that a recent post I’d made on LinkedIn was completely inappropriate and that I should be much more careful about what I publish on the platform in the future. My first thought was that my account had been hacked and someone had said something horrible using my name. The person then showed me the post they were offended by, and I was confused. It was my post all right, but it wasn’t rude or controversial.

I’ve shown it to friends, family and colleagues and nobody can work out why it’s inappropriate. Any ideas?

We’re not going to publish the post for obvious reasons, but part of me wishes we could – to show how innocuous it is. Your friends, family and colleagues aren’t missing some obvious ambiguity: this is, as you say, thoroughly uncontroversial. And, although what you’re talking about might be considered a very mild gripe, the tone is so light-hearted and optimistic that it couldn’t possibly be considered rude.

It’s a bit of a mystery, to be honest, although I have one suggestion that may help you get closer to an answer than you are now.

When we write public opinions on social media (or in the pages of a newspaper, for that matter), there’s lots of room for reading between the lines. In fact, we expect and require it if we want our message to be understood. The medium demands brevity; we’re not writing a book, which means we’re not covering every possible angle, perspective or counterpoint.

Sometimes this reader inference works really well, and a piece of writing conveys precisely what the author meant in just a few words. Or sometimes it works well because there’s humour or wit in what’s left unsaid.

This senior colleague may have taken your gentle, general bellyache and interpreted it as a veiled personal attack.

But in other situations, in an attempt to understand a ‘full picture’ from just a small sketch, a reader will misinterpret a short post. Instead of astutely reading between the lines, they’ll read too much into an aspect of the statement. That can cause confusion or even anger. And I wonder whether that might have happened in your case – in quite a specific way. To explain, I need to go on an astrological tangent – it’ll be a short detour, I promise.

Horoscopes are written in a very particular way, for them to trigger what’s known as the Barnum effect. That’s the psychological phenomenon in which a person reads a vague description and accepts that it’s uniquely accurate and applicable to them.