1. What Does It Really Mean?

            Almost anything that anyone says can have more than one meaning. While this makes word play and puns possible, it can complicate doing project/programme purpose. project/programme purpose needs to be conducted in simple language, with everyone involved in a project/program in complete agreement about what the language defining the project/program actually means.

            Sometimes language—both spoken and written—is misinterpreted accidentally. Sometimes it is done on purpose. Sometimes writing is so vague and a piece so poorly written or complicated that it is impossible to figure out exactly what the writer was actually trying to communicate.

            One of the goals of any communication strategy is to make sure that all the messages that are released are structured, written, and presented in such a way as to reduce the possibility of misunderstanding and misinterpretation.            

            The key to minimizing misinterpretation is to make sure that the meaning is as obvious as possible. Here, careful thought and simplicity are the keys, as is showing your message to others in the organization to see if your meaning is clear. As anyone who has ever read even a few project/programme purpose documents or government regulations knows, many executives and bureaucrats seem to be incapable of saying anything simply.

            Some are vague because they do not know what is expected of them. Others are vague because they are afraid of ever saying anything that takes a organization stand or position on anything. Others do not want anyone to know what is actually going on. Still others do not really know how to communicate simply. There are even those who take pride in their ability to obfuscate.

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2. What Does It Really Mean? (Continued)

            One of the reason there are so many books available on how to operate computers and how to use specific software programs—such as word processing, spreadsheets, and for creating and using graphics, photography, video, and animation—is that the user manuals that come with the computers and the software programs themselves are often unintelligible.

            The people who write them either do not know how—or care—to explain themselves simply.  What frequently happens is that there is an over use of jargon when people try to explain what they want others to understand.  Jargon is an example of the COIK principle – Clear Only If Know. When you know the jargon, the meaning is very clear; if not, then the meaning is a mystery.

            Like lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, doctors, academics, and the people who write computer manuals, are often also known for insisting that they show off their vocabulary, and how convoluted they can make their sentences, even if their audience doesn’t know what they are talking about. In other words, rather than writing clearly, many people are more interested in seeming educated or forget that they are using jargon that others don’t understand. Here’s one example of academic verbal overkill taken from an Internet site (http://www.write-an-essay.com/essay_jargon.html), that helps students write more clearly:

In situationist projects, the methods of instrumental science are inverted and replaced with a disturbing desire to make people suffer in order to experience the sensual, essentially alienated, narcissistic aspects of modern life. The poetics of weathering, mortality, etc, became, in situationist practice, as reactionary nihilist lament upon the death of reciprocity between individual and common creativity.

            Academics can often get away with writing like that because they grade their students; their students do not grade them. In the organizational world, however, we are “graded” by our action sponsors/beneficiaries, beneficiaries, stockholders, and partners. If they don’t understand what we are saying, we can do worse than flunk. We can wind up out of project/programme purpose and unemployed.

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3. Simplicity

            As French author Nicolas Boileau put it:

What is conceived well is expressed clearly, and the words to say it will arrive with ease.

            Just how does one manage to do that? Here are six tips to help you keep your writing simple, and make it simple for your readers, listeners, or viewers to follow:

1. Be organized: Make sure your writing moves from point to point in a logical, coherent, and simple way.
2. Write properly: Make sure your spelling, grammar, and punctuation are correct and error free. Errors confuse readers, make them lose their train of thought, detract from what you are trying to say, and can cause readers to question or doubt everything you say, even those things that are accurate.
3. Avoid jargon when it will only confuse your readers. Sometimes the use of jargon is effective when your readers understand the jargon. If you are writing something for a group of engineers, use words, phrases, abbreviations, and terms that engineers use. If you are writing for a group of oncologists, write in their language. However, when you are writing for the general public, use words that everyone knows, not the jargon you are familiar with. As previously mentioned, jargon is a very good example of the COIK principle—Clear Only If Know. If you know the jargon, the meaning is very clear; if not, then the meaning is a mystery.
4. Avoid clichés. When you use a cliché you are telling your reader that you are too lazy or too ignorant to say something in an original way. Another interpretation is that you do not consider them worth the effort it would take to do so.
5. Use simple language. You are writing to be read and understood, not to impress—or confuse—people with your vocabulary.
6. Be brief: Keep it as short as possible.

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4.      Simplicity in Action

Keeping your writing simple will help your readers better understand what is the message you are trying to get across.  Here are some examples of simplicity that have changed the world.

            Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity states that energy is the same as mass, and that energy can be turned into mass and mass can be turned into energy. One of the most important concepts of modern physics, it expresses the relationship between energy (E), mass (M), and the speed of light (C), 300,000 kilometers per second, this way:

E=MC²

            The Pythagorean theorem, one of the basic tenets of mathematics, is 20 words:

The sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse.

            Archimedes’ Principle about buoyancy, which explains why steel ships filled with cement don’t sink, can be summed up in 21 words:

The buoyant force on a submerged object is equal to the weight of the fluid that is displaced by that object.

            The 10 Commandments, the basis of morality for all of the world’s Jews and Christians, are 179 words long.

            The United States of America’s Declaration of Independence, the formal document to announce that it was breaking away from England and establishing itself as a free and independent nation, is 1,300 words long.

            How many words does it take for:

·        Your organization to explain its pricing policies?

·        The Common Market to explain policies on importing and exporting dairy products?

·        The government to explain its tax laws?

One of the hallmarks of good writing is simplicity.  It is best to keep your writing simple to allow your audience to best grasp your message.

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5. Be Specific

            While it is important to avoid jargon and use words and phrases that the people you are addressing to understand, it is equally important to be specific and describe exactly what you mean. You do not want to write over your audience’s head, nor on the other hand, treat them like idiots. This is why it is so important to know some key points about your audience:

1.            What they know, including their understanding of any jargon;

2.            What they don’t know;

3.            What they are interested in.

            If, for example, you were to write an article about snow for people who had never skied, or even seen snow for that matter, you would have to define a number of basic terms. If you were to write a similar article for a group of experienced cross-country skiers, you would assume that your readers already knew the basics. You could use words-jargon-that skiers use to describe snow conditions without having to define those terms, words such as corn snow, pack, machine groomed, roto-tilled, mogul, and powder.

            If you were to write about snow for Eskimos, you would be dealing with ways of describing it unique to their culture and language. Anthony C. Woodbury, Ph.D. a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas, at Austin, says that Eskimos have scores of different words for snow. There are five words just to describe “snow particles” as they are falling: snowflakes are qanuk; frost is kaneq; fine particles of snow are called kanevvluk; drifting particles are natquik and clinging particles are nevluk.

            Once that snow hits the ground, they have five more words for it. Nutaryuk means fresh snow, and aniu refers to all snow on ground—both fresh and old. Muruaneq is soft deep snow, getrar is the crust that forms on fallen snow, and it’s qanisqineq when it is floating on water but hasn’t yet turned into ice… for which there are even more words.

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6. Perception Is Reality

            For all practical purposes, when it comes to what others think about things, about us and about what we do, about everything for that matter, perception is their reality—even when the perception is mistaken.

            If you give children a complicated book and make them read it, for example, they will understand some of the words. When you ask them what it was about, they will tell you what they understood. Their understanding is what the book was about—to them. It becomes their reality. Here are a few examples of how children have misinterpreted what they have been taught, taken from collections of student bloopers published on the Internet at http://www.inspiringteachers.com/inspirations/kids/:

• The climate of the Sahara Desert is such that the inhabitants have to live
  elsewhere.
• In the first book of the Bible, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.
• Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients.
• The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history.
• Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

            The same thing happens when adults—including stockholders and beneficiaries—misunderstand what you write. Regardless of what you were trying to say, whatever they get out of it—that is, how they perceive it—becomes their reality, and you and your organization have to live with it.

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7. First Things First

            Before we can communicate anything, we have to know what the people we are trying to communicate with already know—or what they think they know—and how that “knowledge” is getting in the way of the message we are trying to send them.

            If, for example, you are trying to sell a widget to people who are convinced that this product is really a dangerous machine that will explode and hurt them, you have to first convince them that widgets really are perfectly safe before you can even think about selling them one.

            Past information—history and culture—shapes current perception. That perception must be taken into account when shaping a message designed to either reinforce or dispel the ideas or attitudes people already have.

            If to your potential market the word widget “means” danger, until you change that perception, that’s all the word widgets will ever mean. It does not matter what else you say about widgets, whether you say it in a speech, news release, through an expensive advertising campaign, or in interviews on radio or television. There are many examples of this type of perception creating difficulties for organizations . There are numerous examples of this type of perception creating difficulties; here are just a couple:

Coors Beer used its slogan, “Turn it Loose,” into Spanish.  Unfortunately it translated as “suffer from diarrhea.”

Pepsi’s “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation” translated into “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave” in Chinese.

            Not only must you speak in terms that your audience will understand, you have to understand their concerns. You must also understand which concerns are the most important, and address them in that order.

            Once your audience actually believes you when you say that widgets are not dangerous, they might be willing to listen to you talk about how handy they are to have around the house.

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8. Getting Indirect Feedback

            Communication is the two-way exchange of ideas. You say something to me and I interpret what you mean. I then say something to you and you interpret what I mean. We continue talking—communicating—until we are done, until whatever messages or information that needed to be transmitted or exchanged are exchanged and hopefully understood.

            During the communication process we regularly give feedback to the person we are talking to and they give feedback to us to try to make sure we both understand what the other is saying. To be successful and effective communicators we check and verify each other’s interpretation and understanding.

            When someone is reading, watching TV, or listening to a radio or TV interview, however, there is no opportunity for any sort of direct feedback. There is no immediate way to make sure that the message is actually getting through.

            One way to overcome this problem is to build checkpoints into your writing.

            When and where you insert the checkpoints will depend upon the complexity of the material being covered and length of the writing. Are you writing a one-page news release, two pages of instructions, a five-page letter, a 10-page report, a 20-minute speech, a half-hour training video, or a 300-page technical manual?

            Checkpoints can take many shapes and forms. They can be part of what you write, or be included in a separate but acorganizationing piece of literature.

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9. Getting Indirect Feedback (Continued)

            Here are some of the ways feedback can be built into a piece of writing to help ensure that the readers, listeners, or viewers actually understand the material that is presented to them:

·        The piece starts with an outline of what the reader is about to read, and all of the key points to be covered.

• It includes chapter or section headings which summarize what is to follow.
• There are regular lists of the points made and what they mean.
• Each section closes with a summary.
• It includes quizzes, and the answers to the questions. The answers indicate where in the document the information came from so that the readers can go back to those sections they didn’t completely understand.
• In speeches, speakers can periodically sum up the major points they have made so far, repeat how they follow logically—one after the other—and then use them as a stepping stone to get into the next section of the speech. In fact one of the most frequent given pieces of advice about presenting a speech is to tell you audience what you will tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.
• Training videos can be broken down into short modules that include summaries and self-graded tests.

            The point to remember is that if you are going to the trouble of presenting information, you should take a little bit of extra time to make sure that it is best understood by the people you are presenting it to.

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10. Do You Speak Their Language?

            Too often we assume that what is natural and normal for us is natural and normal for everyone.  This is what we mean by the COIK (Clear Only if Known) principle.  Just because something is clear to me does not mean it will be clear to someone else.

            In John Gray’s international best-selling book, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus,” the well-known therapist and relationship counselor points out that men and women often talk and think in two different ways. In effect, they are from two different cultures.

            With that in mind, remember that when you are communicating to your external constituencies, you are communicating with men and women—and that they represent not just gender differences, but in all likelihood a number of different cultures.

            Culture is defined as the shared values, customs, traditions, rituals, behaviors, and beliefs of a nation, national or ethnic group, religion, organization, project/programme purpose, or organization.

            Cultures also share languages or ways of speaking. Just because you may speak the same language, however, does not mean that you speak it in the same way, or that all the words in the language mean the same thing to everyone who uses them. If you have teen-aged children, listen to the way they speak. Do you always understand what they are really saying? Do they always understand you?

            The only way to make sure that you will be understood—that the meaning they find in your words is as close as possible the one you put there—is to make sure that what you say will actually be understandable by your audience. To do that you might have to throw out your assumptions, and actually get to know and understand your audience.

Assignments

Matching the Columns

Answers:

1.)    C

2.)    D

3.)    A

4.)    F

5.)    B

6.)    E

Multiple-Choice

1.         project/programme purpose should be conducted

a.       With people who understand language the same way you do

b.      In simple language

c.       In technical jargon

d.      None of the above

2.         The best way to make sure that your meaning is obvious is to use

a.       Careful thought

b.      Simplicity

c.       Both of the above

d.      None of the above

3.         Some people are vague because

a.       They don’t know what is expected of them

b.      They are afraid of ever saying anything that takes a organization stand or position.

c.       They don’t want anyone to know what is actually going on

d.      None of the above

4.         When writing, you want to

a.      Avoid treating your readers like idiots

b.      Write over your audience’s head

c.       Use good vocabulary to impress your reader’s

d.      None of the above

5.         Some key points to know about your audience are

a.       What they know

b.      What they don’t know

c.       What they are interested in

d.      All of the above

6.         One way to overcome the lack of feedback in some types of communication is

a.       To build checkpoints into your writing

b.      Call everyone who views the information and ask their opinion

c.       Nothing: Feedback doesn’t usually matter

d.      None of the above

7.         ____________ is the two way exchange of ideas.

a.       Press releases

b.      Communication

c.       Email

d.      Feedback

8.         The only way to make sure you will be understood is to

a.       Only talk to people that think the same way as you

b.      Use jargon to convey your message

c.       Make sure what you say will actually be understood by your audience

d.      None of the above

Summary

            Sometimes language—both spoken and written—is misinterpreted accidentally. Sometimes it is done on purpose. Sometimes writing is so vague and a piece so poorly written or complicated that it is impossible to figure out exactly what the writer was actually trying to say. While there is no guaranteed way to make sure that nothing you write is ever misinterpreted, there are numerous ways to make it more understandable to more people.

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Test

1. ______        People do not take pride in their ability to obfuscate.

2. ______        Errors in your writing can cause readers to question or doubt everything                                  you say.

3. ______        While it is important to avoid jargon and use words and phrases that the people you are addressing understand, it is not as important as to be specific and describe exactly what you mean.

4. ______        Perception is reality – even when the perception is wrong.

5. ______        Before we can communicate anything, we have to know what the people                                we are trying to communicate with already know – or what they don’t                                 know – and how that knowledge is getting in the way of our message.

6. ______        Past information and culture shape current perception.

7. ______        If you are going to the trouble of presenting information, it is not                                              necessary to put in extra time to make sure that it is best understood by the             people you are presenting it to.

8. ______        Just because two people speak the same language, does not mean that you                             speak it in the same way.

9. ______        When you are communicating to your external constituencies, you are                         communicating with men and women, and they represent not just gender                            differences, but in all likelihood a number of different cultures.

10. ______      People know how to communicate simply.

Answers:

1.                                          F – Some people do

2.                                          T

3.                                          F – It is equally important

4.                                          T

5.                                          T

6.                                          T

7.                                          F – You should put in extra time to make sure

8.                                          T

9.                                          T

10.                                      F – Many do not know how

Bibliography

Brown, J. (ed.). (1981). Jargonaphasia. New York: Academic Press.

Bostrom, R. (ed.). (1984). Competence in communication: A multidisciplinary approach. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Schiefelbusch, R., & Pickar, J. (eds.) (1984). The acquisition of communicative competence. Baltimore: University Park Press.

Glossary

Jargon – Words and phrases that is used by groups of people that is not understood by the general public.

Communication – The two way exchange of ideas.

Culture – The shared values, customs, traditions, rituals, behaviors, and beliefs of a nation, national or ethnic group, religion, organization, project/programme purpose or organization.

Perception – A person’s view of something. Perception is one’s reality, even if it is wrong. Perception is shaped by history and culture.

Learning Objectives

• One of the goals of any communication strategy is to make sure that all the messages that are released are structured in such a way as to reduce the possibility of misinterpretation.
• Sometimes language is misinterpreted accidentally. Sometimes it is done on purpose. Sometimes writing is so vague and a piece so poorly written or complicated that it is impossible to figure out exactly what the writer was actually trying to say.

Q&A

1.  What are six ways to keep your writing simple?

Six ways to keep your writing simple are to be organized and write properly. You should also avoid jargon and clichés. Use simple language, and be as brief as possible.

2.  What can errors in your writing cause?

Errors confuse readers, make them lose their train of thought, and detract from what you are trying to say. Errors can even cause readers to question or doubt everything you say, even those things that are accurate.

3.  What are some ways that feedback can be built into a piece of writing?

Some ways feedback can be built into a piece of writing are starting the piece with an outline of what the reader is about to read, and all of the key points to be covered. It should include chapter or section headings that summarize what is to follow. There should be regular lists of the points made and what they mean. Each section closes with a summary. The piece includes quizzes, and the answers to the questions and where the answers can be found in the document. In speeches, the speaker can periodically sum up the major points they have made so far, repeat how they follow logically, and then use them as a stepping-stone to get into the next section of the speech. Training videos can be broken down into short modules that include summaries and self graded tests.

End of Module