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Subject:Re: Verbal vs. written communication From:Lisa Higgins <lisarea -at- LUCENT -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 10 Aug 1998 11:51:59 +0000
So then, Catherine Janzen is all like:
> <SUMMARY: Lisa Higgins has a broken brane. Let us all taunt her now.*>
Nobody's entirely sure where language skills are stored, but everyone
is fairly certain they're fragmented. People who've had strokes or
brain injuries can lose the strangest things. The names of colors.
Names in general. The ability to parse two-dimensional
representations. Verbs, animals, foods, textures, you name it. If you
can fit it into a category, someone can lose it through brain
disease or injury. One fairly recent discovery is that women tend to
fragment their language skills more than men, so a woman who suffers
a stroke is more likely than a man to be able to recover her language
abilities.
Now. Lest you think, "Hoo hoo, Lisa. You are going way off topic
now!" you're sort of right, but observe my deft topical maneuverings
in the paragraph that follows!
Brain injury is an extreme example. Whether I am a victim of such I
will leave to conjecture and eventual autopsy, but we all have flabby
parts in our brains that just plain don't work as well as the other
parts. Sometimes, I think that our profession gets mired in trend and
detail. Yes, you have to be careful about using color, idiom,
culturally-biased examples, and so forth; but that's only part of the
story. We may well be writing to people who are colorblind,
non-native speakers, and from other cultures; but we're also writing
to people who don't remember names well, don't parse metaphors well,
and can't judge height or depth.
Obviously, we can't massage our writing to fit all the possible needs
of our users, but it does argue for mixing things up in the way we
write. Nobody's going to click with everything we write, but I think
it's important to introduce enough d*versity (I'm saying a lot of bad
words today) into our writing that we reach the maximum number of our
users.
Lisa.
lisarea -at- lucent -dot- com
*Just kidding. I couldn't snip the original and retain the meaning,
so I took a cheap shot. Just one of the many valuable communication
skills *I* bring to the table.
