I think I have offended a user, how did this happen and what do I do now?

Question

I try to stay as constructive as possible when answering questions in StackOverflow. Especially ones that I think are worth answering.

Recently, I've answered this question, discussing it in the comments as well. The original poster commented on my answer with the following (bold added by me here):

It's fun to see the people who are assuming I'm stupid telling me how C compilers work (hint, I've written one) when the question is on the spec for objective-c. The objective-c spec is really fluid these days, and the C spec was all over the place when objective-c was forked in the early 80's. So it seems reasonable that a smart programmer would make sure before assuming everything is the same.

I did not, in any way mean to come off as belitteling in my answer. True, reading my answer again I don't think it's the nicest ever, but I don't imply anything about OP other than that his assumption about the expression talked about is wrong.

I don't want to be a jerk to users, especially to new users. I think one of the things that make this community good is the fact it's so constructive.

What have I done wrong? How can I avoid these situations in the future?

I thought that maybe I should use words with stronger positive connotations, I honestly don't know. I think my English is decent but it's my second language - what did I miss here?

Answer 1

We communicate over a medium where facial expression, voice inflection and all other benefits afforded by three dimensional space are lost. Occasionally, someone is going to misinterpret something that you write as pedantic, condescending or outright rude when in fact that was not your intention. This happens to native speakers of any language, I don't think your English skills were the problem here.

The only defense against this is to be oddly, if not eerily specific in everything that you say, which is sub optimal because it optimizes for exceedingly rare cases instead of the majority of your audience. One thing I like to do is read a post out loud prior to submitting if it's beyond a trivial length, just so I'm certain that I've been coherent and can be understood without the things that normally assist language.

If you discover that someone has misinterpreted something that you've said, simply apologize and explain that something was lost when your thoughts were converted to bits and transmitted. Then, edit the post to provide clarification. That's all you can do, and that should be all that you need to do.

There are some that are easily offended, some of which hold a grudge indefinitely. There's simply nothing you can do about that, any more than the neighbor that won't speak to you because of the color of the car parked in your driveway. As long as you make a genuine attempt to be professional and rectify such misunderstandings quickly and to the best of your ability, there's nothing else you need to worry about.