In her blog “One Writer’s Window,” Joan Esherick recently discussed a problem writers will face sooner or later: Intent vs. Understanding.

In her situation, she wrote a sentence that made reference to “Pollyanna.” She assumed that it would be interpreted by her readers to refer to a “blindly optimistic” view of things. One of her readers surprised her by telling her that he had never heard of “Pollyanna.”

I’ve never seen the Disney film or read the book, but I know what it means to refer to someone as a “Pollyanna.” This reader didn’t.

Joan’s point, which I agree with completely, is that we should be careful with our word choices and keep the reader in mind.

The trouble is that sometimes keeping the reader in mind doesn’t always work. There’s that old saying that you can’t please everyone. In some cases, there will be a few who you will never please, no matter how hard you try.

I ran across that problem when I introduced a weekly feature on another journal. The feature dealt with words that were used in English but that — at least to some — might be considered unusual or out of the mainstream. One of my readers took issue with my description of such words as “weird” when two of the words in question were of Yiddish origin. This reader told me that she was offended by my use of the word “weird.”

I eventually changed the title of the feature, but I first approached that reader through E-mail and though responses to comments she had posted. I assured her that I didn’t mean to offend anyone and that my use of the word “weird” was to indicate that the words might be unusual to some people. Weird, like most other things, is highly subjective, anyway. What is weird to me may not be weird to you; what is weird to you may be commonplace to me. Since it was my journal, I felt that I had every right to determine what was weird in that context. The reader disagreed and decided she would no longer read the journal. (She later admitted that she hadn’t really been offended: she had only said that she had been to stress her point!)

But that brings up another question: what happens when you receive that dissenting opinion about something that you write? In my case, about a dozen people communicated with me in one method or another about my word choice: the reader who claimed to be offended was the only one who had a problem with that word. So that meant that roughly 92% of my audience didn’t take offense. The single reader who did has since done a few posts about it, and apparently thinks that I missed the bigger point: that one should always consider how others will read his words. I didn’t miss that point. I understand that. But I think we writers have a responsibility to determine after receiving input from others, what we will and will not change. Those who do not agree with our decisions may ultimately decide to stop reading what we have to say. But there must be some kind of bar by which we determine when our intent is being misinterpreted.

As Joan points out, there is no magic formula. The best that a writer can do when he has made such a judgment call is to hope that those who do find something wrong with what we write will at least consider that our intent might be other than what they read. If the reader is unwilling to be open-minded enough to consider that her own interpretation may be wrong, I would be surprised if such a reader would find many authors who didn’t offend at some point.