How to present an alternative without being negative about the other option? [closed]
Closed by System on Jun 14, 2018 at 08:38
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Good day,
I have the following sentence:
Nowadays to reach the mass audience, you don't have to rely on traditional media. Instead, you can embrace social networks such as live video streams.
The point of this is to show that we have so many ways of distributing a movie to the audience that taking the movie theatre route is not a necessity. However, I wouldn't want to offend the movie theatres. Hence, I would like to reword it to show there are options outside the big screen for new movie distribution, especially the indie films.
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2 answers
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To recommend a second option without favouring either one, you need to refer to them equally. That means avoiding negative language and being quite explicit with what you are implying
Your quote (emphasis mine)
Nowadays to reach the mass audience, you don't have to rely on traditional media. Instead, you can embrace social networks such as live video streams.
The phrase "you don't have to rely", though true, implies we are somehow trying to avoid relying on it, perhaps because of some negative quality. Especially saying "instead" implies you should stop using the traditional media as well as take up the new option.
Instead, we want to offer the new option without detracting from the old one:
Nowadays to reach the mass audience you have traditional media and online options, such as social networks and live video streams.
Unfortunately being fair to the first option takes away the emphasis from the second option, so you may want to focus on it in the next sentence/paragraph ("We're going to focus on the online options available"). The trick is not to detract from one for the sake of the other, merely put your focus on one of a set of options.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36934. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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