In standard teenage fashion, the child of a friend of mine posted this to Facebook “science seems way better its awesome what we r learning do not thing of me as a dork i just like learining about interseting stuff” (all errors were kept in deliberately). I read it once or twice and could basically get what the message was, but it took me longer than if he had just written (and punctuated correctly). I, of course, couldn’t resist replying “… and proper English is so overrated anyway. 
” as a small dig to his horrid writing.
Fortunately, he’s a good kid (and conscientious, if not a bit quick to the keyboard) about his statements so he revised it to something a bit more readable. He also promptly complained “I feel like I’m rewriting an essay.”
My response? “But the result is better when you can read it. While science can tell us many things about the world, it is regrettably useless without a language with which to communicate the knowledge gained to others.”
And it was that response that led me to write this blog entry for you. We probably underrate the importance of being able to clearly communicate an idea to another person. The problems are endless:
- We have horrid sentence structure, spelling, etc. All basics that we can learn to overcome.
- We mumble, stutter or otherwise stumble over our words when we speak (if the information is being presented orally). The ratio of signal to noise drops and people lose interest. In writing, we ramble.
- We assume knowledge that the listener does not have. Confusion arises and we lose the otherwise interested party.
- We dumb it down too far and the listener has far more knowledge than we assume they have.
I could keep going on and on, I’m sure, but you get my gist. No matter how good your research on the problem at hand is, no matter how much new information you have to share, nobody is going to hear it if you can’t communicate it adequately. Practice communicating your ideas. Constantly.
Posted on April 5, 2010
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