Establishing vocabulary is useful [LWN.net]

Establishing vocabulary is useful

Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:29 UTC (Fri) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328)
In reply to: Voice is overrated by stijn
Parent article: Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet)

I like email communication for exactly this reason. I cannot count the number of times that I've watched groups of very smart people supposedly come to agreement via voice discussions either in person or on teleconferences. But then, when the real details get written down you find that there was no consensus but only the usual fake, politic evasion of conflict that is what society has developed as the basis for most speech.

Specifically, I like email communication used to convey essays and documents. The use of email for one-line "instant replies" and cheering is just about as useless as those famous two-minute phone calls to "touch base".

The problem is that written communication often fails due to the number of people promoted to positions of importance who have absolutely appalling communication skills. If they cannot brow-beat and evade responsibility through ambiguous yet "assertive" discussions, they're completely at a loss. So they encourage an evasive culture around them, and you end up with an organization paralyzed and unable to actually communicate anything.

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Establishing vocabulary is useful

Posted Feb 23, 2007 10:37 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Surprisingly enough I have totally different view of such discussions. Usually they are very productive and useful where I work. May be because leader must write summary of agreements reached in such discussion and send it to all participants via email afterwards ?

Kind of hard to evade responsibility or conflict when you know that result of discussion must be written by you personally (no matter what others are saying it's leader's responsibility to put words "on paper") and that it'll be visible by all participants and will be archived forever...

Establishing vocabulary is vital

Posted Feb 24, 2007 5:46 UTC (Sat) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

I can't begin to count the number of times I've had to bring technical discussions to a momentary halt to define a word or phrase. Often two people in seeming agreement (or conflict) are assigning different, perfectly reasonable, meanings to the same word.

Another problem is pronouns. `That', `it', `he', &c., are obvious to the speaker, but often not to the hearers. One of the two smartest people I ever met (Hi, Ziggy!) was so egregious that, instead of using a sentence or phrase to ask for clarification, I just took to interjecting ``antecedents!'' every minute or two, whereupon he'd backtrack and disambiguate.

It always struck me as odd that such problems arise so often among engineers, whose jobs demand precision.

Clearing up those misunderstandings almost requires synchronous, voice, communication. If such an error becomes established in text, it can invalidate days of effort before being corrected.