MISCOMMUNICATION

We’ve all been there, I’m sure. It’s the classic miscommunication. There are so many different reasons why communication fails and this is not intended to be a lecture on communication skills, just a reminder about how easy it is to be misunderstood. Especially when we’re talking about the written rather than spoken word.

I didn’t say he visited last Wednesday.

Ok, so it’s a sentence out of context, but nevertheless it’s natural to try and make sense of things. So, what meaning did you place on it? Here are all the possibilities; which one did you choose:

1. Emphasis on ‘I’: Somebody said that he visited last Wednesday, but it wasn’t me that said it.
2. Emphasis on ‘didn’t’. No, you’ve got it wrong, I never said that he visited last Wednesday.
3. Emphasis on ‘say’: I may have inferred that he visited last Wednesday but I never said it outright.
4. Emphasis on ‘he’: I didn’t say he visited last Wednesday, I said she/someone else visited last Wednesday.
5. Emphasis on ‘visited’: I didn’t say he visited last Wednesday, I said he telephoned last Wednesday.
6. Emphasis on ‘last’: I didn’t say he visited last Wednesday, I said he visited the Wednesday before that.
7. Emphasis of ‘Wednesday’: I didn’t say he visited last Wednesday, I said he visited last Tuesday.

Interesting that in just a seven word sentence (8 for the purists as one of those words is a contraction) we can find SEVEN different interpretations just by changing emphasis. If this were spoken instead of written we are likely to be in no doubt as to the meaning. The writer knows exactly where to place the emphasis to give the understanding, but for the reader it’s a lottery and easy to get a completely different meaning.

“The worst distance between two people is misunderstanding” ― Neetesh Dixit