Communication

For someone who writes A LOT. I actually HATE EMAIL. I can't stand email. There are only a select few people I want to email. Usually it is for work.

I have two problems with email.

First of all its way too convenient to not read it or not respond, or for an email to be flagged as spam or for it to stick out from spam in an inbox. Responding is an essential part of communication. Without a response I don't know if a message was delivered. The ease of not responding is something I don't like about email. I discovered my distaste for email while working at RBS Greenwich Capital. I had to get stuff from all of these Investment Bankers and Traders. Getting THOSE type of self important people to respond to an email is like getting an engineer a date with a cheerleader. Less than half the people I emailed responded. I actually had to go and talk to the people in order to get anything done.

Actually that might have been a bad analogy, if less than half of all cheerleaders even looked at an engineer that would be a surprisingly high amount.

Once I actually went to the people I got things accomplished.

My biggest problem with written communication is simple. It's much more confusing than any other type of communication. Perfect history example of confusing communication is from the Civil War. Thankfully the confederates had a miscommunication. At Gettysburg General Ewell was supposed to "take Cemetery Hill if practicable"

He didn't take the hill because he didn't know what if practicable meant, so he had to guess at what it meant. If he had taken the hill the south could have won Gettysburg.

What does if practicable mean? If you have a conversation you can get down to the meaning. You can ask tons of questions so you are as sure of the definition of what is being asked of you as you are of the sum of 1 + 1.

Written communication is SO CONFUSING. In order to make it LESS CONFUSING I try REALLY hard to put EMPHASIS on words to help convey the TONE I am in.

I don't know the percentage but I do know that very little of communication is what is actually said. Instead it is HOW you say it. Body language and tone of voice are really important parts of communication. Am I great at decoding it? Not really. However, having clues from ones tone of voice and body language greatly helps me interpret the actual things that are said.

It's funny though, now with TV on the internet I wonder how often you read a story of a famous person being quoted and then click on a TV link to see HOW they said it. I bet you have done that. I know I have.

I enjoy writing, but it's also the hardest form of communication because it's the hardest one to get your message across.