Choose Your Next Words Carefully

Increasingly, I’ve meandered away from discussing ‘correct’ English to ‘better’ communication. A part of this is an understanding of a complete lack of absolutes, & the realisation that everything is relative. Not only that, but everything is related. It’s not just your perspective, but that of your audience, & if you don’t relate the two, then you end up with a classic miscommunication.

Even relating concepts in successive sentences can be a useful activity to keep the flow of communication less choppy, more navigable. Conversation is like a series of locks in a canal, raising someone’s awareness from a base level of knowing nothing about what you want to talk about, up to the point where you can sail off into the sunset together, pulling in the same direction, on your journey of understanding. At each lock - a sentence, or a paragraph - you slowly float someone’s boat until they’re at the next level. You never let the lock overflow with too much, & you never leave them stranded with a bucket in hand, expecting them to do it for themselves.

You can only take water from the next level. This may sound obvious, but I mean that you can’t introduce a concept before its time. You need the audience to have reached a level where they can take in that concept. You need to know that they’re ready to move their boat into the next lock.

You have to be patient. Yes, there are other conversations that could be happening, but everyone will get their chance to take passage through the locks. No-one gets left behind in the long run. Everyone gets slowly closer to their destination - that nirvana of comprehension when there’s just open water out in front & plain sailing.

This probably means that introducing an aside at this point is a distraction kind of like a lock that goes sideways. It doesn’t seem to achieve much in itself, takes as much time to do the work, & doesn’t get you any further along the journey.

But all of this implies that the journey proper is a lifetime’s conversation between two people, & two real people are constantly changing their boats, & therefore their ability to rise through a lock faster without being tipped over. The locks themselves change in nature, & the lock operator has different moods at different times of the day when the locks are required.

A good conversation is always checking the water level, situationally monitoring the audience’s progress through the locks, adjusting accordingly, & always being ready to stop the water level at any point until things have settled down again.

Now for a generalisation. Men seem to have a one-track mind (focus); women seem to be able to juggle several things happening at once through cursory attention. If you’re peering over the edge of the lock, then you’ve worked out where the water’s coming from. Gender-based miscommunication happens when women use parallel locks with teleportation sideways (not like an aside). Men get confused, & forget which direction they’re heading in. Men use a laborious OH&S policy that sometimes over-ensures that the destination level is reached - by putting the last lock above the expected water line. Women get confused when they’re bombarded with useless information.

Don’t even get me started on how different cultures expect a conversation to flow - which I think I can only do pictorially. Suffice to say that where you were brought up dictates whether the water in the locks should be pumped back up from the bottom to feed the top, should flow directly top to bottom, or should be magically transported from random locks in the sequence.

Locks are simply a mechanism for raising someone’s awareness to where you want to communicate further. How those locks work is the basis for individual (& cultural) styles of communication. How effectively they work is up to the participants.

& never ever use an extended metaphor for the whole discussion, because there just has to be a simpler way of saying things if you look closely enough.