In the last article, we discussed the idea that people preferred to read things that were easy to read, and also gained a sense that confusing writing often resulted from: a) the desire to hide information, and b) a natural tendancy for writers to associate the confusing with the intelligent.
Assertion 5: In our own writing, we are often keenly aware of what we are avoiding.
We could call this the censorship instinct. It is sometimes a good idea to be conscious of this instinct: if you’re trying to make a point, the censorship instinct is an excellent way to pick out the parts of your argument that need reinforcement. This goes for publishing and speaking as well.
The censorship instinct also leaves hallmarks in speech that we can pick up when we listen to other people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_words). Not to trivialize this theory, but it’s simply a refined version of the b.s. detector: We subliminally signal when we are making something up, and the cues for this sort of behavior can be subliminally detected on other people.
Assertion 6: When confusing writing is used to hide something, the confusion often hints at what’s being hidden.
This is something that is actually more obvious in speech than in writing; generally writing can be planned out, studied, and spin doctored until there is little hint of what’s being hidden. Speeches made on the spot don’t have this luxury.
Once we detect b.s., we can often use the signals that caused this detection to pick out the information being hidden/obscured. This means that as a critical listener/reader, it should be in theory possible to get more information from comments made on the spot than from writing in detail. Of course, the specific type of information is only interesting in certain contexts (political scandals and such) and in most cases, this open speech is carefully restricted–and for good reason too!
All of this is generally obvious to people with real-world experience, but through this part and
Part I, we can now systematically develop one tool that helps us do something very important:
understand how other people are communicating.This may seem stupid, but the understanding of speech is not something generally approached in an engineering context.
What we aren’t going to discuss is this: How does one become a convincing speaker? This essay is not meant to define that; rather, it simply sets up guidelines for one aspect of speech. There are already good references on speaking.