For the past several months, I have been consciously trying to (and largely succeeding) in listening to what the dev-team was trying to say instead of only focussing on their words. Whenever they used a word I thought I could misinterpret, I asked them. (“You said the system is very robust. Do you mean to say it can export the data from any DTD or any schema and reformat the text?”) They (the dev-team) usually took that as a sign of profound interest on my part – and explained things a bit more

And, I too have noticed the tendency among writers to focus on words rather than meaning. A few weeks back, during a session on developing quality documents, the presenter said something to the effect that things should be consistent, showed two slides – a Before and an After – and pointed out that the Before slide had one list with all links and another where nothing was linked, and the After had al bullets in both lists linked. The audience leapt at the presenter – saying “Putting inline links in documents is not good practice at all!” The people who argued their heads off during the session were the writers who had, evidently, focussed on the word “link”. The point they lost was – the presenter was _not_ talking about links but about consistency. The After slide could have well been two lists with everything _un_linked.

At the heart of _any_ communication is a willingness to listen. Words, IMHO, are merely tools to communicate, not the communication per se.

We can dot our “i’s” and cross our “t’s” back at our desks to our heart’s content, but let’s try to get to the core of what we are–good communicators. Sometimes to do what we do best, that means holding our tongue and just listening.