Failures to Communicate

[livingdeb]

Lately I've been noticing people who cannot communicate certain things to me in their own native language.

One example is someone who says she added a list when actually she added an item to a list that was already there. If I just need to know if she had to do anything, then that's good enough: yes, she did. If I have to know if there was a good list there already for her to use or whether she had to create her own, I will get the wrong impression.

Another example is someone who says you can't get credit for more than one of the following classes: A, B, and C. Now if I just need to know whether the courses are related in any way, that's good enough. But if I need to know that actually, you can get credit for both B and C but not for both A and B and not for both A and C, then there is no way I would ever guess that. Especially when they also say that A was replaced by B but in fact A was replaced by both B (the first half of A) and C (the second half of A).

I even had to tell a programmer today that updates are much easier to understand if the report generated says that a course has been changed (and then tells me it how has changed) than if it says that a course has been dropped and a new course has been added (and then it turns out the two courses are exactly the same in every way but one). A programmer. A good programmer, even, who has just been complimented on his ability to code reports with very crazy requirements. So it's someone who likes problem solving and knows that details are important.

These three people (and more) do actually know what they're trying to say well enough to make good decisions themselves based on that knowledge, but they just can't think of how to say it. I've sat next to two of the people while they tried several different ways. And then I say, "Well, if you say that, then it sounds like you mean this." And finally I just say, "I would say [whatever I would say]." Even if I say, "I would say something like [general idea of what to say]," some people refuse to try to make up their own sentence and just type in a word or two and sit there stumped until I make up the rest of a nice-sounding version myself and dictate it to them.

How do people grow to adulthood and even middle-age-hood and not know how to say things that they actually understand? I understand that some things are complicated and the first try might not be close enough, but to just not even have any idea of how to proceed? Or to write something that clearly means something else? On specific forms they know people will be using to make decisions about things?

Is there a good way to teach people how to form sentences that mean what they want them to mean? I can't even imagine.

The sad thing is I do the same thing myself (see blog entries that haven't been proofread well enough). But when I re-read it later or someone points out how it could be misleading, I can then think of another way to say it. Maybe it requires a general problem-solving mentality that some people don't like.

Whoever thought that writing and problem solving could be so connected?

Or maybe some people just aren't used to having to be precise? If you mostly communicate orally, you can be very lazy because the other person can keep asking you questions until they figure out what you mean.

How can you train yourself to notice whether the first thing you spewed actually means what you hoped it would mean? If you get too good at this do you automatically become an editor Nazi?

Getting other people to edit my work definitely helps me. It has taught me that I use too many pronouns. The pronouns make sense while I'm writing them but later I can see that I never made some of the antecedents clear.

Frustrating.

Comments

[pamwheatfree.livejournal.com]

I always find this problem is related to how "well read" a person is. Tee hee hee, I ended a sentence with a verb. Okay, where was I. If a person does not see many ways to write a thought then they can have the thought but not know how to write it down. Most of my friends are avid readers. The ones that have trouble expressing themselves are not.

[mac-the-mike.livejournal.com]

It seems like the problem the programmer had is different from the other errors you mentioned. The programmer's updates were true, just not as helpful as they might have been because the programmer didn't see the problem from the student's perspective. I think programmers do this all the time. I think it's because they are under time constraints. They just use the solution that comes to mind easily (from the programmers point of view) and move on to the next problem.

[madspark.livejournal.com]

Programmers are lazy, programming is hard, and there is never any time to do things "right"... so yeah, they will implement stuff from the point of view of easy implementation, not from the point of view of view of "best solution for the user".

And frankly, they often couldn't even if they wanted to, being programmers and not users in the domain!

That is why it's so good to have domain experts on a team... someone who knows the user's point of view and can advocate for them.

Hehehehehehe. Umm. Like THAT ever happens.

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

In this case, the report already had a change template for all other changes, so it wouldn't have been that big of a jump for the programmer to use it for a new kind of change.

These comments about programmer time are distressing. It reminds me of why I decided not to be a technical writer. The technical writer often (usually? always?) has to write instructions for things that do not yet exist. They are supposed to be able to talk to the programmers, but the programmers' higher priority is to actually complete the project. Of course the programmers have the same due date as the writer.

So this is another reason to be distressed that our programmers want to completely rewrite the main system I work on from the ground up. They've spent months fantasizing about what they are going to do without talking to a single end user, middle user, user manager, or anyone else without a clue. (Except that one of them is reading the training modules I wrote, which can at least explain what people currently expect of the thing. Woo hoo! Illicit input!)

[alethiography.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

My experience and belief is that it's not the use of language that makes the difference per se. I think it's more about the use of empathy to understand what it is that another person knows, needs to know, will grasp, will be confused by, etc. I think most people can use language well enough to convey ideas; it's more about choosing the ideas to convey, at least in speech. Writing takes a bit more skill, but in either case, a lot of it is about asking yourself, "What is this person trying to get out of this communication?"

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Interesting. That fits with the advice to know your audience. (I wonder if that's any easier to teach.)

Actually, I have tried to approach it like that with the person in the first example, who I am training and thus currently sitting right next to while she is writing. I'll tell her, "if I didn't know what you had actually done and tried to figure it out from reading that, I'd think you meant ..." And she would delete what she wrote and have real trouble coming up with anything at all.