TA wrote:the apology
This is my new hobby, in fact: scoring apologies like they were Olympic events. A good apology should have the following six elements:
-an expression of regret
-an explanation of what went wrong
-an acknowledgment of responsibility
-a declaration of repentance
-an offer of repair
-a request for forgiveness
Let's see how Hussie's apology holds up on these six metrics:
1. Last sentence of the first paragraph reports regret that he drafted this content and that he then put it somewhere people could discover it. 8/10.
2. The first paragraph serves more or less as an overview of how the situation came about. 9/10.
3. While it doesn't use those exact words necessarily, the second paragraph establishes his role in this error and confirms no excuse can accommodate this outcome. I agree that invoking the need for external review can feel like a fig leaf to distract from his own fundamental responsibility, but in light of other self-damning phrases he used elsewhere, I think this recognition of his fallibility as a single individual and that he can't keep operating as a solo act if it's gonna result in shit like this proliferating is an overall positive inclusion. 7/10.
4. Repentence means abandoning the behavior that caused the injury in the first place. This is the point where the apology starts to flounder, as so much of this apology is structured as a comparison of how these events failed compared to a hypothetical "best case scenario" which was never realistic or achievable. He does just scrape into the qualifying box with the end of his last sentence, but his commitment amounts to little more than to realize how much he can hurt people in the future, rather than to take any concrete steps to prevent such injuries. This is definitely going to hurt his score. 3/10.
5. Hussie completely admits he cannot repair this damage, but I actually don't knock off that many points for this. The initial offense was one of words, and just like you can't unring a bell, you can't undo what these words did. He could certainly have salvaged some other lost points by, say, donating to an appropriate charity or otherwise made some attempt at restitution. 7/10.
6. The question of forgiveness is a tricky one when the perpetrator and his victims are at a remove like this, but I think it's probably an error to evade the issue just because there isn't a single injured party to ask forgiveness of. 4/10.
FINAL SCORE: 6.33/10. Pretty rough, but not really that much worse than the average apology, I don't think. The more important question is how well he avoids similar criticisms in the future.
