Do You Know What You Are Talking About?

Communication is a two-way street. A conversation becomes pointless if the other person isn’t listening to what we say. Listening, therefore, is an internal part of communication. The same is true for reading comprehension. If you miss what the writer is trying to convey, the information you receive can take you far from the intended message. Comprehension is just as important as listening when communicating, especially if you share what you think you heard, except it isn’t accurate.

In recent weeks, I’ve read some posts on facebook where someone is talking about a Scripture verse or something they heard on the news or an article, and they seem to miss what is being said. It’s like they pick something out from what they heard or read and miss a portion of the sentence entirely. Or worse, they complain about it saying something that it doesn’t even say. I’ll give you a silly example.

Sally says, “I like spaghetti so much, I could have it every night for dinner.” Then Marcus goes to social media to complain to everyone about how dumb it is to eat the same thing every night for dinner. Or Judy tells her friends how stupid Sally is for eating spaghetti for every meal because it’s loaded with carbs and starch and she should really eat a variety of things including a healthy portion of vegetables. Hopefully, you can see the problem here. Neither Marcus nor Judy is saying anything remotely the same as what Sally said. Marcus missed the word could. Sally didn’t say she did eat spaghetti for dinner every night. She said she could. And Judy missed the same as Marcus but took it a step further by missing the prepositional phrase, for dinner. Sally did not say that she ate spaghetti for every meal and only spaghetti.

I told you it was a silly example, but I hope you get the point. If you don’t listen or hear (or read) everything the person is saying and keep it all in context, the result is a misunderstanding that can be compounded by sharing your misunderstanding.

It was in eighth grade (many years ago) that we learned how to diagram sentences. Actually, the 8th-grade English teacher only had half of her classes diagram sentences while the other half learned a different method for separating the elements of a sentence. I was in a class that learned the other method. I learned about diagraming sentences when my older brother had 8th-grade English. I was fascinated. I asked the teacher if I could diagram instead of underlining and circling, etc., and she allowed it. I think that diagramming sentences is a far superior way of understanding sentence structures, but it might not be for everyone. That being said, I can’t say which method is used today to teach grammar and sentence structure, but it appears to be lacking. Misunderstandings happen because there seems to be a gap in understanding the syntax. And that leads to problems and to arguments.

I’ve seen comments go back and forth with people arguing over something someone said, and I’m reading through the comments thinking to myself that both of them are wrong and it doesn’t appear that either understood what the other was saying. I myself have been in threads where someone accuses me of saying something that I didn’t say because they either didn’t read or understood what I wrote. I would tell them to go back and read again what I wrote, but they come up with the same conclusion. I’m about ready to tell them to diagram the sentence of what I wrote and tell me what I’m really saying with ALL of the words that I used.

One of Rush Limbaugh’s catchphrases was, “Words have meaning.” So simple, yet so profound. Back in the day, we had to use a dictionary (an actual book) to look up definitions. We were taught in elementary school that if we read a word that we didn’t know, stop right there and look up the word so we could understand the sentence. I was too lazy for that. I would skip over it and just try to get the gist from the rest of the paragraph. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. But I had better things to do than read, and definitely better things to do than thumb through a dictionary. When I got older (and out of school) I read sparingly, but when I did I would come across words that I didn’t know and remember the instruction to use the dictionary. And when I learned new words, I would hear the voice of Rush telling me that words have meaning, “and we should know what words mean.” That was the latter half of his catchphrase. (To my recollection.). Today, it’s much easier to learn new words. Our smart devices have dictionaries at our fingertips. We can click or tap on a word and get an instant definition. (You should still have an old, print dictionary handy.) We should never have the excuse that we didn’t know what a word means.

The point is this, our motto to never stop learning also applies to communication. Never stop learning what someone is saying. Understand the words they are using. It may be that they are using a word or phrase incorrectly, and in that case, you can ask for clarification so that you do understand what they mean. But it is important to have a clear picture of their point of view before trying to correct them or accuse them of something they aren’t saying. Remember, social media is devoid of face-to-face interactions and audible tones and inflections that come from speech. We can only rely on the words that are typed out on the screen. Be fair with your critique of anyone’s words. And ask them to do the same with you so you can both understand what the other is saying.

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This post is a result of working on another post for the KLM blog. You can find that post here. I read a couple of blog posts on the Quartodecimen Controversy. One was shared with me because someone said I had the information wrong, and the other I found by accident because of the intriguing title. Both of them had the problem of misrepresenting the material because they left out some of the information. That reminded me of the multiple facebook comments that I mentioned above that left out information from what was said and complained about it anyway. So I shifted over here to make this post because it was something that needed to be addressed. I hope you find this post helpful.