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Establishing vocabulary is usefulEstablishing vocabulary is usefulPosted Feb 23, 2007 10:37 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Establishing vocabulary is useful by Pc5Y9sbv Parent article: Doesn't the Social Web Realize that People Talk? (O'ReillyNet)
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...
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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.
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