Thinking about the importance of a Disclaimer

Disclaimer:

• This piece of writing isn’t trying to impose any rule / belief on what should be included in whatever it is that people write. This is simply a humble personal observation of the writing pieces that I generally like and respect. And also what I believe writers / people who write should take some better consideration.
• This may not be at all relevant in the field of novels, especially fictional or such, and writings that generally don’t serve the purpose of them being seriously consumed by readers. On writing this, I mainly thought about blogs / notes / statuses / opinions / expressions that people publish publicly.
• This is the first time I’ve ever written something as such, and due to my lack of experience, this note can be poorly structured and immensely random even though I tried my best not to be. Constructive feedback is more than welcome. I’d even love to invite you for a coffee sometimes. :)

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A couple of days ago, I had the chance to ear-drop (unintentionally) this one guy at a vegetarian restaurant who was giving a lecture-like speech to a group of 10 people on science topics (including but not limited to: blackholes, the mystery of the Pi number, and how the universe functions). The way he talked made me feel as if the speech started with “Once upon a time”, which was pretty unimpressive to me personally because it is not the manner with which I believe people should tackle science topics. I even wrote a status about how weird it felt to me, and I don’t really care appearing judgmental because I actually was and still am. But that aside, this encounter with the group also made me think about the importance of a Disclaimer, which is the main topic of this note.

I am by all means not a professional writer and / or critic myself. But I do read regularly, and I read blogs especially regularly. As a reader myself, over the course of time, it dawned on me that those authors I enjoy reading / respect the most are those who take their writings seriously enough to prepare their precious audiences for the possibility that what they’re saying can be wrong. Or it only holds true given certain conditions. And that is what I believe to be the foremost function of a Disclaimer.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines a Disclaimer: “A disclaimer is generally any statement intended to specify or delimit the scope of rights and obligations that may be exercised and enforced by parties in a legally recognized relationship. The term disclaimer usually implies situations that involve some level of uncertainty, waiver, or risk.”

You have a brilliant idea, and you have the utmost desire to share it with the world. Good for you. But man, what if you’re wrong? And what if you’re right in most cases but in other cases you’re debatable? I believe as a writer, you have the responsibility to assure your readers that this is just an opinion, and that this opinion can be biased, and they should be prepared for it. Assuming that all of your audiences can be well-aware of these is quite an unkind thing to do, which is what I sometimes use as a compass to tell responsible and respectable writers from the others (content and writing skills aside). And, more importantly, I’m pretty sure that you are biased unless you’re talking about hard facts. Even Google’s search results can be biased as the algorithms are produced and run by humans, according to this TED Talk. A disclaimer can be a brilliant way to protect your audiences, and also a way to protect yourself.

Of course being overly careful can sometimes (if not most of the time) kill the fun. In this case, it can kill the possible interesting debates that your sounding-imposing piece may trigger among the audiences. What else can people argue with you when you already stated that you’re simply voicing your opinion? Well, in this case, if constructive debates are what you’re looking for, I believe there are still ways to get that without possibly hurting your readers, simply by stating your openness to different ideas.

At this point, you may ask, why is it important to care about whether or not you hurt your readers? If they don’t like what they’re reading, then stop. That is very true I can’t possibly argue. However, I have two questions and I hope you will think about them: How are you expecting everybody to be at the level of your understanding this world? Isn’t the reason you write being able to share interesting points of view? If your answer is No, then you pretty much fall into the category of writing not for the purpose of the piece being consumed, which is bullet number 2 in my disclaimer for this note, and that means you’re not its audience. Still, thank you for reading. I hope we’ll have a chance to talk again soon.