Recently I have been thinking a lot about the way we communicate. It all started because of my dog – yes, you’ve read it correctly – my four-legged friend had inspired me.

Let me tell you how. 

It was an exciting day for me. I haven’t seen my dog for a few days and I was looking forward to picking her up and getting back to our adventures together.

As I walked through the gate to get her, she run up to me excited, but she didn’t do her usual crazy zoomies around me, which was strange. “She just woke up,” I was told, so I assumed this is the reason why she’s not her usual bonkers self.

We got home and something still wasn’t right. Her tail wasn’t wagging, her eyes weren’t as bright and she was getting startled by almost everything and anything. She looked genuinely scared. 

A few days gone by with no change. She even stopped responding to her name and we started to get worried. Of course, we investigated in all the ways we could think of, including a test that finally gave us the answer. 

There’s something you need to know about my dog. She has never had a great hearing, and I don’t mean the ‘selective hearing’ dogs often get when they choose to ignore the owner, her hearing was impaired, but not to the point it was causing much of a challenge.

Well, not until recently. The test we did was to check her hearing and the results showed that she is now completely deaf. The audiologist explained that loosing this point of reference is what likely caused the low mood she’s been in. 

For us it meant that we had to figure out how to use sign language, and come up with signs that are clear and distinctive so that she can quickly learn what they mean. This experience is what made me mull over how challenging communication can be. Particularly how much we assume someone we’re conversing with will understand what we mean, especially when we write.  

Have you ever received a reply to your message or an email and thought ‘that’s not what I meant’ or ‘they didn’t understand’? Perhaps you even found yourself in a loop trying to explain something, but the conversation was getting nowhere? Me too! 

Ambiguity can be so tricky, especially when it comes to written words. It is so easy to write something that may actually be interpreted another way. A few wrong keystrokes, or a few missing keystrokes and ambiguity has found its way into your message.

Let me give you an example.

Have a read of the following sentence.

‘Despite increasing automation of air traffic control systems managing complex weather conditions still requires human oversight which presents ongoing challenges.’

Can you instantly tell what I’m trying to say? I’m willing to bet that you had to pause or even re-read that sentence because it sounded a little strange. And the reason it sounded a little strange is because it is actually missing a couple of things.

This is the challenge of writing. The smallest detail counts, especially if you want to be confident that what you intent to say is what the reader will indeed understand. 

In my example, fixing punctuation will do the trick, but sometimes it’s swapping one word for another, correcting misspellings or misplaced commas, or improving the structure. Sometimes it’s re-writing the text in a different tone, swapping professional for conversational, for example. 

This is exactly what I focus on when I proofread. Ambiguity can very easily sneak into anyone’s writing, but, if you know what to look for, it can just as easily be corrected. Improving clarity is what motivates me to do what I do, and my dog has reminded me how much I enjoy it.

She is doing okay, by the way. She is slowly figuring out her new normal and she started to wag her tail again. 

Happy writing!