I have a debilitating need for good wording in kink partners. How many times have I seen a promising dom/top profile, only to visit their About Me section and find a) unfinished sentences, random capitalisation, poor grammar etc. or b) no text at all? Or received a message from a nice-looking person in my area, only to open it and be faced with one long run-on sentence, boilerplate nonsense or a completely unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness essay?
I added a bit in my own profile begging guys to check their grammar before hitting Send, acknowledging that some folk might be neuroatypical, or accessing English as a second language, and encouraging them to disclose this. My request went unheeded and the messy messages kept landing. In the end I put together a blog post called How Not To Get A Reply, purely to let myself off the hook if people ignored my pleas.
Am I a snob? I don’t think so. I wasn’t privately educated and I don’t get a kick out of looking down on others; I just value clarity and care. If someone wants to belittle and best me (especially in, say, a teacher-student role-play), it’s hard to conjure respect for them if they routinely use comma splices or the wrong they’re/their/there variant. It may be unfair to judge someone using this metric but the brain wants what it wants: I need to feel my correspondent is at least as bright as me, or (better yet) brighter. It’s also hard to get lost in a story someone’s spinning when you’re distracted by their grocer’s apostrophes.
Good kinky correspondence is about more than decent grammar, though. Tone, register and forms of address all play a part. I wouldn’t dream of addressing a guy as Master/Daddy/Sir in an opening message, even if his profile listed him as such. For some people this can be hot, but for many others, they attach great intimacy to titles, roles and honorifics, and aren’t keen on a rando leaping right in there. With power play, the titles we use with partners set the dynamic for the scene, so it can be presumptuous to hit Start with someone you don’t know. If in doubt, just use person’s chosen nickname, and work from there.
Note: If someone ONLY wishes to be addressed with a specific title, they’ll likely say in their profile. Many female tops/dommes stress that they must be addressed only as goddess/mistress/delete as applicable, but I can see how this might be a practical move, especially if they’re professionals, firstly to establish distance and manage expectations, secondly to avoid being mistitled by an over-eager sub with their own nomenclature (“Hello Auntie Sue!”), and finally to see whether a potential partner/client can/will read and follow their instructions. As a female sub, I don’t usually write to dudes who insist on being called Grand High Vizier from the get-go. I like to know they are in touch with reality and don’t take themselves too seriously, and also that once a humiliating scene is over, we can emerge from it to have a friendly conversation as equals.
As for tone and register, a relaxed, friendly greeting and brief introduction go a long way, as do polite questions about your potential partner’s interests, or mentioning something you enjoyed about their profile. This applies to tops, bottoms and everyone in between. There’s no need to perform your kink as an opening gambit with a strident ‘domly dom’ manifesto or river of baby-talk babble. If you want to learn who they are, show them something of the real you. Once you know they can express themselves and listen, you can raid the dressing-up box together.