and yet, even w/ this focus and proficiency, i had a disagreement w/ frlncwrtr. now, freelance and i have very different opinions on some key political matters. the specifics aren’t important, however, and up until recently, we’d always enjoyed a fairly congenial back and forth. but the other day we had a discussion which became heated and rapidly escalated towards a flamewar. this was largely a function of my having expressed myself poorly.
(sorry about that, man)
i am by nature a person who strives to make sure i am understood clearly and that i have understood someone else clearly. but through the course of my online experiences, i’ve also learned that sometimes we all express themselves poorly, or are having a bad day, or misread something in a key way, or any of a number of other things.
having a discussion online isn’t like having one face to face: we have only word choices and the way we read someone’s comments: there are no verbal cues such as the way someone says something, or more glaringly, body language cues. it’s said that only 10% of face to face communication is verbal: the rest is these other cues.
so imagine now being restricted to using only 10% of the tools you normally use to communicate and still making others understand what you mean. yet this is what each of us does here, voluntarily, every single time we post a new blog entry, or even more often, comment on a blog entry. we are taking that hit in our toolbox of communication.
how well would you be able to conduct a phone conversation with only 10% of your vocabulary? how well could an artist paint a picture using only 10% of his or her palette? poorly at best, wouldn’t you say? yet by and large the discussions here are muted—far moreso than any us should have any reason to expect.
but obviously, miscommunications happen in the real world as well as here on soulcast. i work in an office with a total of six people. of the six people, i am the only native english speaker: there are three other asians (all born overseas and studied english in school) and 2 latinas (also born overseas and studied english in school as well). part of my job entails facilitating communication between our office in the US and our overseas headquarters (in asia) and our factories (located in yet other countries in asia).
i’ve been doing this job for three years and change, not an hour goes by in this office that i don’t see a miscommunication. we use e-mail to communicate w/ our various overseas colleagues, we are careful to restrict our vocabularies to use no words that will be unfamiliar and even so, no matter how carefully we try, we never fail to have these problems. that of course is why i’m often at home, sending e-mail at 10 pm.
even among fellow english-speaking natives, this can happen, as did the other day b/n freelance and myself. indeed, i had a doozy of a misunderstanding w/ a very good friend recently, which would have been easily avoided.
miscommunications abound. it’s a simple fact: none of us are telepathic* and as a result, we can never be absolutely certain we know what someone means when they say [x]. they are ultimately unavoidable but i’ve learned a few techniques that help me reduce** possible misunderstandings:
- when conveying information: use short, unambiguous statements. shorter sentences are harder to misunderstand b/c there’s simply less to be misunderstood. and IMX, non-specific language serves only to elicit questions seeking clarification.
- when receiving information: re-phrase the information and seek confirmation. this one lesson alone has saved me countless hours of sifting through e-mails and discussion forum posts.
- when either receiving or conveying information: do not if at all possible respond while angry. lately i’ve been forced to anger my customer, a customer that usually is very happy w/ me. the e-mails i receive from a saleswoman of her seniority are things i would never, ever send to someone w/ whom i had a professional relationship. we’ve all broken this one, but i figured a reminder is in order.
while i think it’s particularly important when online to be aware of these things, i think back on any number of recent discussions i’ve been in, when instead of wasting time going through the “i said [x] but meant [y]” and “i thought you meant [z]!” exercise, i could have been doing something more interesting. and never mind the arguments that could have been avoided.
i find little more frustrating than dealing with a problem stemming from a misunderstanding. i always find myself thinking “if [person] had only said [thing], this could all have been avoided!” and figuratively, if not literally, banging my head against the nearest hard surface. the reason we communicate is to convey information: if we had nothing to convey, we wouldn’t do it!
so those things above are the tools i use to reduce misunderstandings. what do you use? have i missed something important? am i just repeating things you already know? comment and let me know.
ed
*my unnamed friend, i know you’re laughing. :p
**i say reduce b/c i don’t believe it’s actually possible to eliminate them
