Communication can be an art. In any way. In former decades, not to say centuries, writing was done, especially in business contexts, by specially trained people, sometimes secretaries and even assistants. In even more ‘former times’, they weren’t women, at all.
Since that time, the art of writing business correspondence was pushed towards women, around the time that the first typewriters became available.
After that, a longer stretch followed, compared, where women sat sometimes in large offices, in a veritable hell-hole of the noise of clacking typewriters, and wrote all the business correspondence that these days is done – via email.
Additionally, almost no one has a secretary or ‘typist’ to do their typing for them anymore. The letters back and forth in former times were taken in sacks each day in larger and smaller companies to the post. Or in whole cartloads, in internal mail, carted around by specially hired mailboys.
So, what happens? It becomes rather more difficult to define or identify the style considered appropriate inside or outside an organization.
And words matter: They create an atmosphere. They make images in our minds.
Yet, still communication is also a science. When we find in real life that we are misunderstood, it’s mostly a question of sender and receiver: To stay in the image, one ‘says’ green, the other understands ‘red’.
Paul Watzlawick was a standards’ creating scientist in that field, communication. He wrote standard works. He also wrote a bestseller of decades, his “The Situation is Hopeless but not Serious: The Pursuit of Unhappiness“.
Meant as a funny, sometimes satirical, look on how easily people get each other wrong and make their respective lives difficult. The story of the man with the hammer can be found inside it.
One or the other of my readers will have encountered funny as well as mundane situations of misunderstandings that could be resolved easily and with warmth.
Sometimes, misunderstandings can become more serious, when people do not talk about it early in the day. Or just rely on hearsay. Another miscommunication that so easily happens. A nice German saying goes like this:
“If a man sneezes at the top of the village high street, at the bottom of the village high, he is dead.” Meaning to say: Hearsay usually enlarges things – out of proportion.
So, let’s listen to each other, not to 3rd parties – and be patient. Culture and customs can make things tricky. But with understanding and compassion we will get at the bottom of them.