In addition to her spinning points, Denise has a couple of common enough features to her writing that sometimes serve her ulterior motives but are mostly just irritating.
They also make marvelously effective tells as to when an anonymous post or email is probably written by her.
Herewith:
1. The bullying use of the initial “Please ... ”
“Please remember that we are a family ...” “Please remember that Mrs. Mooney is not an adoption professional ...”
There are other examples (the first is clearly Denise, as it's from one of their newsletters; the second was posted anonymously on FRUA.
But they both share the trait of taking a word that is the very essence of etiquette and turning it into a billy club. Her “please’”s don’t even give you the option of politely declining. She wants you to agree with her without the pretense of consideration.
If she ever really meant it the way most people do when they say it, we’d never have known. It always was the verbal equivalent of a heavy arm on the shoulder.
2. Generally poor spelling and syntax.
See examples in almost every email she’s written that we’ve reprinted.
Actually, that's not something that really works to her advantage, since it exposes her amateurishness, especially given her claims to be a professional among professionals. No wonder she dropped out of the U of Akron’s office-management program ... we can’t imagine a single employer who’d let some of that writing go out under their letterhead.
But it does give her away when she tries to hide her identity to bash us.
And she can’t do a thing about it!
3. The overuse of question marks? The needless tendency to turn every statement into a question? Particularly when you’re under fire?
MY GOD THIS IS SO IRRITATING!
The most blatant example is her email to us with the real Bulgarian timeline, the subject line of which is:
“I Thought I Sent This Last Week?”
First, she artfully covered a lie. Second, she made it harder to realize that she had, by creating the impression that honest disagreement over whether that statement was true even before we had received it.
This may have started as the personal tic of an insecure woman, but it quickly turned into the most nefarious thing she does in her emails (and we think she knows this). The net effect is not only to create a false haze of confusion, it also creates an equally unwarranted doubt in the mind of the person it is addressed to.
Obviously, she hopes the person (usually someone questioning, or beginning to question, her) will be so disoriented as to back off. In some cases this has worked; when it hasn’t, she herself drops the subject and moves on.
But if it’s one thing to treat your clients like this, it’s another to assume it will work on the state. And when she did try to snow Linda Saridakis this way, it probably resulted in negative comments about her credibility in her final report that might not have been there otherwise.
4. The overuse of “advised.”
This probably dates from her early days as a police dispatcher ... people in law enforcement are taught to use that in reports all the time.
But it’s particularly grating to read it in a routine email. Why can’t she just“say” or “tell” things like normal people do? Does she advise her kids that they better come down for dinner?
The answer is twofold. First, she thinks she’s impressing you (on top of herself) by using such a legalistic word; second is that it sometimes actually works to make you think she’s some sort of on-top-of-it professional whose opinion you must naturally defer to on this matter.
Fortunately, perhaps, she kills it through overuse.