The problems of the written word and communication

[Salmastryon]

I'm sure everyone has encountered an situation where you wrote one thing in an AIM, post or e-mail and the receiver took the words an entirely different. Without body language and tonal queues some of the meaning behind words is lost.

Most the time the time this can be partial off set by the use of smilies, but sometimes even then there is confusion.

I, myself, have problems with this a lot. I seem to come off as stiff or angry. *whinces* Which isn't at all near the truth. It is just that when I get into a discussion and someone comes up with a good counter argument I get all excited. I love a good debate and I guess a lot of my responses reflect my debating background from when I was on the debate team in HS.

So first off if you think I'm sounding angry or harsh at you more then likely you've got me excited and mentally stimulated. I make it a rule never to post when I'm angry or upset.

Secondly, Anyone have any advice on how to avoid problems like this? Since I still haven't figured it out yet...

[Me-Nuriko]

This is a problem. I sometimes have a hard time to understand what other people mean. And If I'm in a depressed mood, I might interpret things differently than I would have done if I've been in a happy mood. For this, I thoroughly appologize.

Of course I can be misunderstood, too. As you wrote, without the body language and tone of voice, it can be very hard to say things in a way that can only be interpreted the same way the writer meant it.

I guess the only thing to do is to post a question to ask if it was meant the way it was interpreted. If we all try our best to communicate, and give the others the benefit of the doubt if we think someone is angry, then eventually we can solve all misunderstandings.

[kanshu]

I know I run into that on a regular base.

When you read something, you "hear" and "see" yourself, in a way. Without the other's voice and gestures, you are bound to "interpret" it depending on your mood, experience and intentions. It's basically the intensified version of what normally happens.

What can you do? Like Me-Nuriko said: ASK.
More often then not, the sender has no idea of how their message is received, and is shocked when suddenly all hell breaks loose. Sum up what you think you understood, in your own words.
BTW, that is also a valid way to clean up things "in real life".

[therhoda]

I do the same thing. Most people I know that I talk to know me well enough to know the the keyboard takes off a few of the normal filters to what I will and won't say. I will say thing with out a thought in messenger.

I especially have to watch it is I am in a mood. But If you ask me I will tell You if that is what I meant or not. I hate to admit it but sometimes I have been know to mean exactly what the person is mad about. On the whole though I think a lot of different written english get lost in translation between where you are from. It isn't even different countries here in the states I swear there are people that are speaking english of unknown origin. What they mean when they say one thing is different than I when I say it.

Opti you are so right about this being a skill that work in real life. The wait a second, did You mean...... when you said .........? I can't believe how many people wouldn't even think to ask hey are You doing this on purpose.

[JeiC]

hm...actually, it's kinda sad, but I think I'm better understood in this sense than in real life. I'm soft spoken with a thick accent (even for my area I'm told) and I dunno...lots of people get confused with me.

And yes, before ya start askin, I let some of my accent flow into my typin. If I let all of it, none of ya would understand me.

[kellen]

I have problems sometimes in how I come across. For me, choosing between written and spoken word is almost a "lesser of two evils" thing... Don't get me wrong; I love to write. My stories are who I am and I wouldn't give them up for anything. And I love to talk to people.

I stutter horribly. When speaking, I can come across as the stupidest sounding person EVER...and it's TOTALLY frustrating. So, communicating via speaking doesn't always work well with me.

My other problem is that I'm mildly dyslexic (and if you can't see it without me telling you, that's because I work VERY hard and proofread what I post VERY carefully before I post it). In written communication, I had problems with other people's posts, if there's webspeak, blatant mispelling, etc, etc... I try very hard not become frustrated, but if I'm talking to someone who does that, I will respond in a way that might make them mad. I'm not trying to, but ... I don't know. I guess my mood gets in my way. There's a resentment. If I can work this hard to disguise my dyslexia, then certainly someone can run something through spell check.

I also tend to employ sarcasm at random intervals. Sarcasm is difficult to get across in the written word.

Well, that post was pretty pointless. If I ever do anything that makes anybody mad, please I like to know so I can avoid doing such in the future.

cheers,Kellen

[Me-Nuriko]

Actually, I often prefer the written word before the spoken. That's because I never can argue or discuss anything when I speak, I just never find the right arguments and reasons. I have problems with this when writing too, but I'm better at it, because I have more time to think, and then I don't have to feel stressed by people who just throws arguments over me before I can think my own reasons.

So the only problem in writing is this interpretation problem.

Kellen: Wow. You're doing a great job. Being a writer with dyslexia, and we can't even see it in your posts here. You have my admiration.

[kanshu]

Kellen, You're doing a great job, and I can understand that you get angry by others being so careless about language.
Me, I'm definately guilty of spelling errors and such things in posts and stories alike. Stories are rarer, only that ones that my spell checker doesn't catch because they are actual words. But in a post, I sometimes hammer away during lunch break, or breakfast break, and hit the send button, and then I just forget to correct the typos. Though, grammar or word order will never be correct.

Don't feel so bad about stuttering. *huggles* Most people who stutter are extremly intelligent - at least that's my experience. Like, the head of the programmer company who work with my department stutters the more anxious/tired he gets. But he's a genius when it comes to computer stuff, and he has great solutions for the problems at hand. (Yes, I know... this probably doesn't help a bit, but other than the idiots who poke fun at others out of their own inferior complexes, has anyone who seriously talked to you ever said you were stupid? I know from my own experience - I'm short of one hand - that one tends to... 'overrate' the impact of the handicap. Most people aren't as 'irritated' as one may think. However, most people are surprised, and most people are helpless as to how they are supposed to behave so that one doesn't feel insulted. It sometimes helps to just "tell them the rules". )

Now, if you were like me, forgetting names that you knew about before, *that's* dumb. It's a miracle I still remember my own name sometimes.

[kellen]

Me-Nuriko, Optimoose: I appreciate the admiration and the kudos. *blushes* You don't know how wonderfully satisfying it is to hear that you can't tell. It makes my hard work worthwhile. Thank you.

I tend to come across as a fic nazi sometimes, for the very reason of my own handicap. And that's where people usually get the wrong impression of me; when I try to read a story that's got weird word order, horrible grammar, bad spelling, etc, I usually end up in frustrated tears. (It can make a person feel inferior somehow to not be able to read something without extreme difficutly.) When I send a review to someone asking if they could please clean up their fic so I can read it, I usually get no response or an angry response. That's part of the reason why I've been telling people recently that I am dyslexic because maybe if they realize I do have a physical limitation then perhaps they could be bothered to run things through spell check.

So, I tend to come across as someone who demands perfection. Not perfection so much as readability.

Oh, and Optimoose, thanks for the kind words about the stuttering. You barely know me and you're assuming I'm intelligent... wow... LoL... Better start acting smart. ;D

cheers,Kellen

[Salmastryon]

I don't know if it makes you feel any better but bad spelling and grammar give just as much problems to the opposite end of the reading spectrum. I'm a terrifically fast reader with a high comprehension rate(one of the few things I do well )

If a person has terrible reading or spelling it can make something nearly impossible for me to read. I normally have to resort to reading the thing aloud to puzzle out what it means at that point.

On the stuttering thing you have my total admiration. I got so stressed out earlier this year when I was moving that it end up with me stuttering. It reduced me to tears, the more I concentrated and fought to say things correctly the worse it got. If I had to deal with that on a daily basis, I think I'd be in pieces.

You have so much strength of character to deal with that.

[cesmith]

Kellen
I don't think there should be any problem with your telling people that you are dyslexic, most people I'm sure would understand. This way, by telling them, they might realize that your not attacking them for their errors.

Your intelligence shines through your writing, believe me. I would have never guessed you were dyslexic from the way your posts are written. You must work very hard for your end results. My friends daughter is 20 and dyslexic and she is having so much difficulty still. Maybe you could IM me some of the ideas you use that work, maybe they are ones she hasn't tried.

Forgetting names? My bane of existence. I hear it every day. Little hands on hips, shaking their heads at me, with a smile on their faces, "Miss Chris, my name is Alejandra." Then they laugh and I just remind them to tell me their correct names when I forget. Half the time they all get called sweetie or pumpkin just so I don't mix them up. Of course you can't do that with Adults, though I've accidently done it to coworkers a few time and I blush and laugh.

I love communicating through the written word. It gives me time to say exactly what I want to say. When I rush, all I have to do is re-read what I've written and change it. Can't do that with the spoken word, and my mouth works faster than my brain sometimes (heck, All the time).

[kanshu]

Kellen,
Well, if your posts are any indicator to your intelligence, then you must be pretty smart.
I think it's okay if you tell people why you have a problem. Hey, I *do* have a problem with bad English in stories, because I don't understand it - literally. It is, after all, a foreign language, which means that each word is learned vocabulary. The same goes for grammar structures. So I only can read what I can translate, and someties, a story is so mistake ridden that I hardly can translate it. I don't know if the other non-native English speakers on this list run into the same problem, but I know it gives me a lot of trouble.

cesmith: Sometimes, I wished people would communicate in a "manga" way... with printed out text and images to illustrate.

[cesmith]

OptiMoose, because of the way your posts always are, I constantly forget that you don't speak English as your first language.

Now in a Manga style communication you would definitely have a great advantage. Your pictures look like the object you are trying to draw. My picture people would be stick forms with more words trying to explain what they are, than what they are trying to say. Everything I draw looks like a 4 year old did it. In fact, most 4 year olds draw better than I do.

I do remember, though, that when I used to take literature classes in Spanish I prefered to do the written reports as opposed to the oral ones. First of all I HATE public speaking. Secondly, I am very self-concious of making pronunciation errors. With the written reports I again had time to look things up and make corrections. Reading the actual story, or poem (they were the hardest to do and even though I used to write poetry in Spanish (Simple , simple things) the more complex ones were just too impossible), was hard and it was frustrating to have to look up words just to get through sentences, trying to get meanings. The novel I was reading used to have English words written above the Spanish words everywhere.

I still use a dictionary now for when I write . I look up a lot of words so I can spell them correctly. I'm not a naturally good speller.

[Salmastryon]

I have a speller/divider dictionary next to my computer that I use constantly.

[cesmith]

I have the HUGE Webster's unabridged dictionary that I use. It has every word and more, that I could possibly want to spell.