Conspiracy in Complexity LO15722

William Buxton (wbuxton@hns.com)
Mon, 10 Nov 1997 11:29:36 -0500

Replying to LO15689 --

Ray Evans Harrell wrote about the connotative richness of language and
suggested the following rewrite:

"Writing something short is a lot harder than writing something long. To
make something simple, you really, really need to understand it."

should be

"To make something simple, a communicator's audience really, really must
understand its implications, otherwise communicating it in such a manner
calls into question the communicator's intent."

Mike Jay also suggested that maybe things aren't as simple as I might have
suggested, including ...

"It doesn't often matter what you say but what others hear and if it's
truly complex, then a "level" of understanding needs to be in place before
your simple ideas--mean what you intend."

Hard to argue with either of these folks--unless their arguments are used
to take the communicators (us) off the hook.

Years ago I had a manager who, when confronted with something that was not
understood correctly by the intended audience, would say, "Well, we don't
write for the lazy or the ignorant." It was always good for a laugh, but
we knew he was only kidding! We knew full well that it was our job to
make sure things did communicate and to keep working until they did..

So I think I'll stick by my guns here. If it's fat and fuzzy, it needs
work.

Cheers
Bill

-- 

"William Buxton" <wbuxton@hns.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>