A Tangent

I like to write. If you've read my blog for any length of time, that should be obvious. If it isn't, maybe it's time to discuss the warning signs of dementia with your doctor.

Certain mediums lend themselves to writing - books, letters, blogs. Other medium, well, not so much. The key problem with communicating through writing is that so much of our language is physical - our facial expressions, the way we stand, hand animations; or aural - voice fluctuations, intonation, volume. While possible to convey the non-verbal cues through writing, doing so requires more verbosity than simply expressing your thought.

For example, "You look nice today". How do I mean that?

1) "You look nice today", he said, tilting his head back and giving her elevator eyes, the kind that start at the bottom and work their way up, stopping on every floor.

2) "You look nice today", he snickered, shielding his eyes from her bright yellow shirt.

3) "You look nice today", he said, smiling brightly as he handed her the invoice he needed approved.

4) "You look nice today", he exclaimed, whistling and standing to admire her new hair cut.


See what I mean? But who has time to read all of that, much less type it? Conventional wisdom with emails recommends keeping them concise and to the point. "The project is on schedule." It's like we're in Dragnet: "Just the facts."

I remember an email I sent early in my career to a client who responded to me with pure venom. It wasn't her fault, really. I blame the geniuses in our marketing department who decided to brand our system with the creative use of an exclamation point. So when I responded to her inquiry with "You can find that on OurSystem!", and then explained how, she thought I was yelling at her from condescension, instead of helping her. I didn't use the exclamation point in any future communications about our product.

Social media sites only exacerbate the problem by limiting your character count. Facebook - 264 characters. Twitter - 164. It's difficult to say anything meaningful with so few characters. This sentence alone requires over fifty characters. Most of the time, people end up trying too hard to be witty and compelling in their conciseness and fail miserably. Text messaging and Instant messaging aren't much better. Avid users of these medium have gotten creative - necessity does breed invention, after all - and developed "emoticons". While smiley and dopey are easy to represent - :-) and :-b - sarcasm isn't. Innuendo isn't. Probably a good thing that lust isn't, either.

My point? I once read a satirical rant from a man directed to all women that contained a line that I think accurately reflects what I'm trying to convey:

"If we say something to you and there are two ways to take it, and one of them makes you mad, and the other one makes you smile, we mean the one that makes you smile."

Life is complicated enough without having to explain what our "definition of 'is', is". Besides, your little outbursts reflect more on you than on your target.

Can't we all just get along?